But there’s going to be a new mine in East Tennessee — one of a few slated across the country, their permits expedited by President Donald Trump’s declaration of an “energy emergency” and his designating coal a critical mineral.

Trump was only hours into his second term when he signed an executive order declaring a national energy emergency that directed federal agencies to “identify and exercise any lawful emergency authorities available to them” to identify and exploit domestic energy resources. The administration also has scrapped Biden-era rules that made it easier to bring mining-related complaints to the federal government.

The emergency designation compresses the typically years-long environmental review required for a new mine to just weeks. These assessments are to be compiled within 14 days of receiving a permit application, limiting comment periods to 10 days. The process of compiling an environmental impact statement – a time-intensive procedure involving scientists from many disciplines and assessments of wildlife populations, water quality, and other factors –  is reduced to less than a month. The government insists this eliminates burdensome red tape.

“We’re not just issuing permits — we’re supporting communities, securing supply chains for critical industries, and making sure the U.S. stays competitive in a changing global energy landscape,” Adam Suess,  the acting assistant secretary for land and minerals management at the Interior Department, said in a statement. A representative of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement told Grist that community safety is top of mind, pointing to the administration’s $725 million investment in abandoned mineland reclamation.

The Department of Interior ruled that the Hurricane Creek Mine slated for Claiborne County, Tennessee, would have “no significant impact” and approved it. It will provide about two dozen jobs. The strip mine will cover 635 acres of previously mined land that has reverted to forest. Hurricane Creek Mining, LLC plans to pry 1.8 million tons of coal from the earth over 10 years.

The Clearfork Valley, which straddles two rural counties and has long struggled economically, bears the scars of more than a century’s underground and surface mining. Local residents and scientists regularly test the creeks for signs of bright-orange mine drainage and other toxins.

The land is part of a tract the Nature Conservancy bought in 2019 for conservation purposes, but because of ownership structures in the coalfields, it owns only the land, not the minerals within it. “We have concerns about the potential environmental impacts of the operation,” the organization said in a statement. “We seek assurance that there will be adequate bonding, consistent and transparent environmental monitoring, and good reclamation practices.”

Matt Hepler, an environmental scientist with environmental advocacy group Appalachian Voices, has been following the mine’s public review process since the company applied for a permit in 2023. He remains skeptical that things will work out well for Hurricane Creek. Despite Trump’s promise that he is “bringing back an industry that’s been abandoned,” coal has seen a steady decline, driven in no small part by the plummeting price of natural gas. The number of people working the nation’s coal mines has steadily declined from 89,000 or so in 2012 to about 41,300 today. Production fell 31 percent during Trump’s first term, and has continued that slide. 

“What is this company doing differently that’s going to allow them to profitably succeed while so many other mines have not been able to make that work?” he said. “All the time I’ve been working in Tennessee there’s only been a couple of mines permitted to begin with because production has been on the downswing there,” Hepler added. 

Economists say opening more mines may not reverse the global downward trend. Plentiful, cheap natural gas, along with increasingly affordable wind and solar, are displacing coal as an energy source. The situation is so dire that one Stanford University study argued that the gas would continue its climb even with the elimination of coal-related regulations. Metallurgical coal, used to make steel — and which Hurricane Creek hopes  to excavate — fares no better. It has seen flat or declining demand amid innovation in steel production.

Expedited permits are leading to new mines in the West as well. The Department of Interior just approved a land lease for Wyoming’s first new coal mine in 50 years. Ramaco Resources will extract and process the material in order to retrieve the rare earth and other critical minerals found alongside it. The Trump administration also is selling coal leases on previously protected federal land. Shiloh Hernandez, a senior attorney at the Northern Rockies office of the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice, thinks it is a fool’s errand.

“I don’t see them changing the fundamental dynamics of coal,” he said. “That’s not to say that the Trump administration won’t cause lots of harm in the process by both making the public pay more money for energy than they should and by keeping some of these coal plants and coal mines that really are zombies.”

Still, Hernandez said he isn’t seeing many new permits, just quicker approval of those already in the pipeline. That said, the Trump administration’s moves to streamline environmental review will reduce oversight and the time the public has to scrutinize coal projects.

“The result is there’s just going to be it’s going to be more difficult for the public to participate, and more harm is going to occur,” Hernandez said. “There’s going to be less attention to the harm that’s caused by these operations.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump is fast-tracking new coal mines – even when they don’t make economic sense on Jul 18, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Katie Myers.

Read the full filing here.

Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program, issued the following statement:

“For nearly a century, the law has been very clear that the government has a responsibility to assure an abundant supply of electric energy throughout the United States and can only permit electricity exports after a finding that such exports would not ‘impair the sufficiency of electric supply within the United States.’

“In a radical, reckless and unsupported deregulatory act, the U.S. Department of Energy proposes replacing the current standard of review with whatever energy companies suggest, as the proposed rule literally ‘will simply allow applicants to include information the applicant deems relevant to such an authorization for consideration by the DOE under the Federal Power Act.’ In our opposition to this inane proposed rule, we argue that DOE cannot ignore a clear statutory mandate by Congress, and the proposed rule must be rejected. The Trump Administration proposes eviscerating a core consumer protection of the Federal Power Act to promote the agenda of financial traders and energy companies at the expense of American families.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

In a brief executive order, Donald Trump called for the formation of the “Make America Beautiful Again” commission. Chaired by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who also serves as the administration’s energy czar, the commission is tasked with providing recommendations on conserving “America’s national treasures and natural resources.” A parallel executive order directs the Department of the Interior to consider charging foreign visitors higher entrance fees to the National Park System.

While conservatives have hailed the order as an environmental win, the Trump administration’s record is one of the most pro-polluter in the country’s history. On his first day back in office, Trump issued a flurry of executive orders opening up the Arctic to oil and gas drilling and prioritizing energy development on public lands. The administration has also fast-tracked drilling and mining projects on public lands, slashed royalty rates oil and gas companies must pay for drilling on public lands, and gutted bedrock environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act.

In response, Dan Ritzman, Director of Conservation at Sierra Club, released the following statement:

“This country has some of the most majestic and treasured public lands in the world. If we hope to pass that unparalleled heritage onto the next generation, those landscapes need stewardship and resources. Donald Trump is offering anything but. From day one, the Trump administration has slashed budgets at conservation agencies, fired thousands of essential conservation staff, gutted bedrock environmental laws, and given free rein to billionaires and corporations to pollute our public lands. ‘Make America Beautiful Again’ is the tiniest fig leaf on the most anti-environment administration in our country’s history.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The budget bill just passed by the Senate provides more than $170 billion in new funding for immigration enforcement and detention. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, who worked on an analysis published by the American Immigration Council, says the new budget would make ICE “the single largest federal law enforcement agency in the history of the nation.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

For weeks, smoke from Canadian wildfires has poured down into the United States, drifting clear across the Atlantic into Europe. Pulmonologist Vivek Balasubramaniam, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, noticed more people calling in with asthma symptoms and asking for advice when smoke doused the region in early June.

“Walking outside those days, I mean, you could see the brown-orange discoloration to the air,” he said. “When you’re breathing in, you kind of feel like the air is a little heavier, a little harder to do things.” 

Monitoring air quality is key to forecasting and assessing wildfire smoke. Right now, that’s a coordinated effort between federal, state, tribal, and local entities. Federally approved and privately operated monitors feed data into tools like the Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow tool, and help forecast air quality and issue public health guidance. But air quality scientists worry that EPA budget and job cuts will make it difficult to get air quality information to people, endangering public health. And when it comes to longer-term research, some experts say community monitors won’t fill in the gap.

The Trump administration announced plans last month to reorganize the agency and cut staff back to levels last seen in the Reagan era, which could mean the elimination of thousands of jobs. The EPA’s proposed budget for 2026 would halve its funding, from $9.14 billion to $4.16 billion. 

“This is really disappointing,” said Christi Chester-Schroeder, lead air quality scientist at IQAir, a free platform. “And honestly, it is sort of antithetical, in the sense that the healthcare costs associated with breathing poor quality error are really significant globally.”

Along with proposed cuts to grants for state and local air quality management and pollution control, the EPA is planning to restructure how it regulates air quality, dismantling two offices charged with regulating air and climate pollution and running such programs: the Office of Atmospheric Protection and the Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards. 

Read Next

The smoke from Canada’s wildfires may be even more toxic than usual

Matt Simon

The EPA plans to create two new offices to clear a backlog of state plans to meet national air quality standards. A spokesperson said in an email that the new Office of State Air Partnerships would “improve coordination with state, local, and tribal air permitting agencies” to “resolve permitting concerns more efficiently and ensure EPA is working with states, not against them, to advance our shared mission.” The Office of Clean Air Programs would “align statutory obligations and essential functions with centers of expertise to create greater transparency in our regulatory work.”

Pushback on staffing and funding cuts has been constant. A U.S. District Court judge in Maryland ruled last week that the agency’s termination of $600 million in grants to help communities address pollution was unlawful. And the largest federal workers union was part of a coalition that sued this spring to halt cuts. A federal judge ruled in their favor in May, blocking new layoff and reorganization notices.

“EPA is complying with the court’s preliminary injunction,” said an EPA spokesperson of the lawsuit in an email. “In line with the court’s order and guidance received by the Department of Justice, EPA is moving forward with only reorganization planning activities.”

But the agency has already been hamstrung, according to Cathleen Kelly, a senior fellow at the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress, who said that eliminating the current air monitoring offices would harm research and public health — even if some of their components are preserved elsewhere. 

“It will leave communities more vulnerable when wildfire smoke makes the air unhealthy to breathe, for example, or when corporate polluters release unlawful amounts of pollution and on bad air quality days that increase asthma attacks and land kids and adults that are struggling to breathe in the hospital,” she said.

Overall, air quality in the U.S. has improved in the decades since the Clean Air Act was enacted in 1970 and began more strictly regulating industrial pollution. The EPA’s own sophisticated monitors have been able to track changes over time, confirming how effective air quality regulations are. 

That progress has been curtailed as wildfire smoke has become more prevalent, and even one bad wildfire season can put the health of communities at risk, with Indigenous nations, low-income communities, and communities of color disproportionately affected. The American Lung Association says nearly half of Americans live with unhealthy levels of air pollution, and that wildfire smoke is a major factor. It can spread far from its source, affecting urban areas that are already dealing with pollution from industry and transportation as well as rural communities with less monitoring because they have fewer people. 

As the EPA seeks to cut jobs, some experts worry there won’t be the staff — or the institutional expertise — to process and distribute that data even if air quality monitors continue to collect readings. And as the EPA guts environmental regulations, like rolling back clean air rules for power plants, it may be harder for scientists to properly assess impacts to public health. 

“That’s, to me, the most concerning consequence,” said Tarik Benmarhnia, a professor of environmental epidemiology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who studies wildfire smoke.

The main hazard in wildfire smoke is PM 2.5, or particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns (a millionth of a meter). This is bad for anyone to breathe, but especially hazardous for those with asthma or heart conditions. As wildfire smoke travels through the atmosphere, it also changes chemically to produce the toxic gas ozone, making breathing the stuff even more hazardous. 

Canadian scientists are also worried that the fires are burning across soils heavily polluted by mining operations, so the smoke could be laced with toxicants like arsenic and lead.

Read Next

Canada’s wildfire crisis is displacing First Nations at alarming rates

Miacel Spotted Elk

As climate change exacerbates droughts and raises temperatures — which sucks up the moisture in vegetation — more landscapes are burning and loading the atmosphere with smoke. Recent research has shown that the human health impact of PM 2.5 from wildfire smoke can be up to 10 times higher than other sources of particulate matter, said Benmarhnia. A study published last month in the journal Communications Earth and Environment found that between 2006 and 2020, climate change contributed to 15,000 deaths due to particulate matter from wildfire smoke. 

To understand how wildfire smoke is affecting people’s health and warn them of its dangers, it needs to be measured. Places like the Great Lakes that aren’t used to dealing with wildfires and their fallout are just now solidifying public health awareness campaigns. 

“The first statewide air quality alert for fine particulate matter from wildfire smoke was in 2023,” said Aaron Ferguson, who manages the Climate and Tracking Unit at the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. “That’s really when we first started developing a lot of our public health guidance and response strategies.”

That work relies in part on more than 40 air quality stations run by the state through EPA grants that are still in place for now.

Increasingly, federal air quality monitors have been supplemented by private companies and community monitoring efforts, including among tribal nations, rural areas and places federal and state governments have neglected. Free services like PurpleAir and IQAir provide hyper-local air quality readings for people to determine if they need to shelter from wildfire smoke. 

“What people are using this for is to decide when to let the kids out with asthma, or when to go cycling if they’re an athlete,” said Adrian Dybwad, CEO and founder of PurpleAir.

Pierce Mayville, the air quality scientist for the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, said those monitors are “huge” when it comes to getting people usable, practical information, providing near-real-time information about air quality. They have one and are setting up another. 

“If we see the level really high in the purple, then we let people know,” Mayville said. “People can look at the map and see a live-time view of what’s going on so they can keep track of the air quality in their area.”

What Benmarhnia and other scientists need is a steady stream of reliable data, especially from advanced sensors that determine the composition of wildfire smoke, like if it contains heavy metals. Cheaper instruments just measure the amount of PM 2.5 in the air, not what it’s made of. They can then correlate that data with hospital emissions in a given area to get insights into what makes wildfire emissions so deadly. 

“In order to be able to better test these hypotheses, we need these federally funded monitors and networks and data,” Benmarhnia said. “This is critical. Without that, it would be impossible to do this type of research and better understand what is going on.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How shrinking the EPA could make wildfire smoke even more dangerous on Jun 24, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Izzy Ross.

For weeks, smoke from Canadian wildfires has poured down into the United States, drifting clear across the Atlantic into Europe. Pulmonologist Vivek Balasubramaniam, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, noticed more people calling in with asthma symptoms and asking for advice when smoke doused the region in early June.

“Walking outside those days, I mean, you could see the brown-orange discoloration to the air,” he said. “When you’re breathing in, you kind of feel like the air is a little heavier, a little harder to do things.” 

Monitoring air quality is key to forecasting and assessing wildfire smoke. Right now, that’s a coordinated effort between federal, state, tribal, and local entities. Federally approved and privately operated monitors feed data into tools like the Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow tool, and help forecast air quality and issue public health guidance. But air quality scientists worry that EPA budget and job cuts will make it difficult to get air quality information to people, endangering public health. And when it comes to longer-term research, some experts say community monitors won’t fill in the gap.

The Trump administration announced plans last month to reorganize the agency and cut staff back to levels last seen in the Reagan era, which could mean the elimination of thousands of jobs. The EPA’s proposed budget for 2026 would halve its funding, from $9.14 billion to $4.16 billion. 

“This is really disappointing,” said Christi Chester-Schroeder, lead air quality scientist at IQAir, a free platform. “And honestly, it is sort of antithetical, in the sense that the healthcare costs associated with breathing poor quality error are really significant globally.”

Along with proposed cuts to grants for state and local air quality management and pollution control, the EPA is planning to restructure how it regulates air quality, dismantling two offices charged with regulating air and climate pollution and running such programs: the Office of Atmospheric Protection and the Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards. 

Read Next

The smoke from Canada’s wildfires may be even more toxic than usual

Matt Simon

The EPA plans to create two new offices to clear a backlog of state plans to meet national air quality standards. A spokesperson said in an email that the new Office of State Air Partnerships would “improve coordination with state, local, and tribal air permitting agencies” to “resolve permitting concerns more efficiently and ensure EPA is working with states, not against them, to advance our shared mission.” The Office of Clean Air Programs would “align statutory obligations and essential functions with centers of expertise to create greater transparency in our regulatory work.”

Pushback on staffing and funding cuts has been constant. A U.S. District Court judge in Maryland ruled last week that the agency’s termination of $600 million in grants to help communities address pollution was unlawful. And the largest federal workers union was part of a coalition that sued this spring to halt cuts. A federal judge ruled in their favor in May, blocking new layoff and reorganization notices.

“EPA is complying with the court’s preliminary injunction,” said an EPA spokesperson of the lawsuit in an email. “In line with the court’s order and guidance received by the Department of Justice, EPA is moving forward with only reorganization planning activities.”

But the agency has already been hamstrung, according to Cathleen Kelly, a senior fellow at the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress, who said that eliminating the current air monitoring offices would harm research and public health — even if some of their components are preserved elsewhere. 

“It will leave communities more vulnerable when wildfire smoke makes the air unhealthy to breathe, for example, or when corporate polluters release unlawful amounts of pollution and on bad air quality days that increase asthma attacks and land kids and adults that are struggling to breathe in the hospital,” she said.

Overall, air quality in the U.S. has improved in the decades since the Clean Air Act was enacted in 1970 and began more strictly regulating industrial pollution. The EPA’s own sophisticated monitors have been able to track changes over time, confirming how effective air quality regulations are. 

That progress has been curtailed as wildfire smoke has become more prevalent, and even one bad wildfire season can put the health of communities at risk, with Indigenous nations, low-income communities, and communities of color disproportionately affected. The American Lung Association says nearly half of Americans live with unhealthy levels of air pollution, and that wildfire smoke is a major factor. It can spread far from its source, affecting urban areas that are already dealing with pollution from industry and transportation as well as rural communities with less monitoring because they have fewer people. 

As the EPA seeks to cut jobs, some experts worry there won’t be the staff — or the institutional expertise — to process and distribute that data even if air quality monitors continue to collect readings. And as the EPA guts environmental regulations, like rolling back clean air rules for power plants, it may be harder for scientists to properly assess impacts to public health. 

“That’s, to me, the most concerning consequence,” said Tarik Benmarhnia, a professor of environmental epidemiology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who studies wildfire smoke.

The main hazard in wildfire smoke is PM 2.5, or particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns (a millionth of a meter). This is bad for anyone to breathe, but especially hazardous for those with asthma or heart conditions. As wildfire smoke travels through the atmosphere, it also changes chemically to produce the toxic gas ozone, making breathing the stuff even more hazardous. 

Canadian scientists are also worried that the fires are burning across soils heavily polluted by mining operations, so the smoke could be laced with toxicants like arsenic and lead.

Read Next

Canada’s wildfire crisis is displacing First Nations at alarming rates

Miacel Spotted Elk

As climate change exacerbates droughts and raises temperatures — which sucks up the moisture in vegetation — more landscapes are burning and loading the atmosphere with smoke. Recent research has shown that the human health impact of PM 2.5 from wildfire smoke can be up to 10 times higher than other sources of particulate matter, said Benmarhnia. A study published last month in the journal Communications Earth and Environment found that between 2006 and 2020, climate change contributed to 15,000 deaths due to particulate matter from wildfire smoke. 

To understand how wildfire smoke is affecting people’s health and warn them of its dangers, it needs to be measured. Places like the Great Lakes that aren’t used to dealing with wildfires and their fallout are just now solidifying public health awareness campaigns. 

“The first statewide air quality alert for fine particulate matter from wildfire smoke was in 2023,” said Aaron Ferguson, who manages the Climate and Tracking Unit at the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. “That’s really when we first started developing a lot of our public health guidance and response strategies.”

That work relies in part on more than 40 air quality stations run by the state through EPA grants that are still in place for now.

Increasingly, federal air quality monitors have been supplemented by private companies and community monitoring efforts, including among tribal nations, rural areas and places federal and state governments have neglected. Free services like PurpleAir and IQAir provide hyper-local air quality readings for people to determine if they need to shelter from wildfire smoke. 

“What people are using this for is to decide when to let the kids out with asthma, or when to go cycling if they’re an athlete,” said Adrian Dybwad, CEO and founder of PurpleAir.

Pierce Mayville, the air quality scientist for the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, said those monitors are “huge” when it comes to getting people usable, practical information, providing near-real-time information about air quality. They have one and are setting up another. 

“If we see the level really high in the purple, then we let people know,” Mayville said. “People can look at the map and see a live-time view of what’s going on so they can keep track of the air quality in their area.”

What Benmarhnia and other scientists need is a steady stream of reliable data, especially from advanced sensors that determine the composition of wildfire smoke, like if it contains heavy metals. Cheaper instruments just measure the amount of PM 2.5 in the air, not what it’s made of. They can then correlate that data with hospital emissions in a given area to get insights into what makes wildfire emissions so deadly. 

“In order to be able to better test these hypotheses, we need these federally funded monitors and networks and data,” Benmarhnia said. “This is critical. Without that, it would be impossible to do this type of research and better understand what is going on.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How shrinking the EPA could make wildfire smoke even more dangerous on Jun 24, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Izzy Ross.

For weeks, smoke from Canadian wildfires has poured down into the United States, drifting clear across the Atlantic into Europe. Pulmonologist Vivek Balasubramaniam, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, noticed more people calling in with asthma symptoms and asking for advice when smoke doused the region in early June.

“Walking outside those days, I mean, you could see the brown-orange discoloration to the air,” he said. “When you’re breathing in, you kind of feel like the air is a little heavier, a little harder to do things.” 

Monitoring air quality is key to forecasting and assessing wildfire smoke. Right now, that’s a coordinated effort between federal, state, tribal, and local entities. Federally approved and privately operated monitors feed data into tools like the Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow tool, and help forecast air quality and issue public health guidance. But air quality scientists worry that EPA budget and job cuts will make it difficult to get air quality information to people, endangering public health. And when it comes to longer-term research, some experts say community monitors won’t fill in the gap.

The Trump administration announced plans last month to reorganize the agency and cut staff back to levels last seen in the Reagan era, which could mean the elimination of thousands of jobs. The EPA’s proposed budget for 2026 would halve its funding, from $9.14 billion to $4.16 billion. 

“This is really disappointing,” said Christi Chester-Schroeder, lead air quality scientist at IQAir, a free platform. “And honestly, it is sort of antithetical, in the sense that the healthcare costs associated with breathing poor quality error are really significant globally.”

Along with proposed cuts to grants for state and local air quality management and pollution control, the EPA is planning to restructure how it regulates air quality, dismantling two offices charged with regulating air and climate pollution and running such programs: the Office of Atmospheric Protection and the Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards. 

Read Next

The smoke from Canada’s wildfires may be even more toxic than usual

Matt Simon

The EPA plans to create two new offices to clear a backlog of state plans to meet national air quality standards. A spokesperson said in an email that the new Office of State Air Partnerships would “improve coordination with state, local, and tribal air permitting agencies” to “resolve permitting concerns more efficiently and ensure EPA is working with states, not against them, to advance our shared mission.” The Office of Clean Air Programs would “align statutory obligations and essential functions with centers of expertise to create greater transparency in our regulatory work.”

Pushback on staffing and funding cuts has been constant. A U.S. District Court judge in Maryland ruled last week that the agency’s termination of $600 million in grants to help communities address pollution was unlawful. And the largest federal workers union was part of a coalition that sued this spring to halt cuts. A federal judge ruled in their favor in May, blocking new layoff and reorganization notices.

“EPA is complying with the court’s preliminary injunction,” said an EPA spokesperson of the lawsuit in an email. “In line with the court’s order and guidance received by the Department of Justice, EPA is moving forward with only reorganization planning activities.”

But the agency has already been hamstrung, according to Cathleen Kelly, a senior fellow at the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress, who said that eliminating the current air monitoring offices would harm research and public health — even if some of their components are preserved elsewhere. 

“It will leave communities more vulnerable when wildfire smoke makes the air unhealthy to breathe, for example, or when corporate polluters release unlawful amounts of pollution and on bad air quality days that increase asthma attacks and land kids and adults that are struggling to breathe in the hospital,” she said.

Overall, air quality in the U.S. has improved in the decades since the Clean Air Act was enacted in 1970 and began more strictly regulating industrial pollution. The EPA’s own sophisticated monitors have been able to track changes over time, confirming how effective air quality regulations are. 

That progress has been curtailed as wildfire smoke has become more prevalent, and even one bad wildfire season can put the health of communities at risk, with Indigenous nations, low-income communities, and communities of color disproportionately affected. The American Lung Association says nearly half of Americans live with unhealthy levels of air pollution, and that wildfire smoke is a major factor. It can spread far from its source, affecting urban areas that are already dealing with pollution from industry and transportation as well as rural communities with less monitoring because they have fewer people. 

As the EPA seeks to cut jobs, some experts worry there won’t be the staff — or the institutional expertise — to process and distribute that data even if air quality monitors continue to collect readings. And as the EPA guts environmental regulations, like rolling back clean air rules for power plants, it may be harder for scientists to properly assess impacts to public health. 

“That’s, to me, the most concerning consequence,” said Tarik Benmarhnia, a professor of environmental epidemiology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who studies wildfire smoke.

The main hazard in wildfire smoke is PM 2.5, or particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns (a millionth of a meter). This is bad for anyone to breathe, but especially hazardous for those with asthma or heart conditions. As wildfire smoke travels through the atmosphere, it also changes chemically to produce the toxic gas ozone, making breathing the stuff even more hazardous. 

Canadian scientists are also worried that the fires are burning across soils heavily polluted by mining operations, so the smoke could be laced with toxicants like arsenic and lead.

Read Next

Canada’s wildfire crisis is displacing First Nations at alarming rates

Miacel Spotted Elk

As climate change exacerbates droughts and raises temperatures — which sucks up the moisture in vegetation — more landscapes are burning and loading the atmosphere with smoke. Recent research has shown that the human health impact of PM 2.5 from wildfire smoke can be up to 10 times higher than other sources of particulate matter, said Benmarhnia. A study published last month in the journal Communications Earth and Environment found that between 2006 and 2020, climate change contributed to 15,000 deaths due to particulate matter from wildfire smoke. 

To understand how wildfire smoke is affecting people’s health and warn them of its dangers, it needs to be measured. Places like the Great Lakes that aren’t used to dealing with wildfires and their fallout are just now solidifying public health awareness campaigns. 

“The first statewide air quality alert for fine particulate matter from wildfire smoke was in 2023,” said Aaron Ferguson, who manages the Climate and Tracking Unit at the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. “That’s really when we first started developing a lot of our public health guidance and response strategies.”

That work relies in part on more than 40 air quality stations run by the state through EPA grants that are still in place for now.

Increasingly, federal air quality monitors have been supplemented by private companies and community monitoring efforts, including among tribal nations, rural areas and places federal and state governments have neglected. Free services like PurpleAir and IQAir provide hyper-local air quality readings for people to determine if they need to shelter from wildfire smoke. 

“What people are using this for is to decide when to let the kids out with asthma, or when to go cycling if they’re an athlete,” said Adrian Dybwad, CEO and founder of PurpleAir.

Pierce Mayville, the air quality scientist for the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, said those monitors are “huge” when it comes to getting people usable, practical information, providing near-real-time information about air quality. They have one and are setting up another. 

“If we see the level really high in the purple, then we let people know,” Mayville said. “People can look at the map and see a live-time view of what’s going on so they can keep track of the air quality in their area.”

What Benmarhnia and other scientists need is a steady stream of reliable data, especially from advanced sensors that determine the composition of wildfire smoke, like if it contains heavy metals. Cheaper instruments just measure the amount of PM 2.5 in the air, not what it’s made of. They can then correlate that data with hospital emissions in a given area to get insights into what makes wildfire emissions so deadly. 

“In order to be able to better test these hypotheses, we need these federally funded monitors and networks and data,” Benmarhnia said. “This is critical. Without that, it would be impossible to do this type of research and better understand what is going on.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How shrinking the EPA could make wildfire smoke even more dangerous on Jun 24, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Izzy Ross.

The four-day long armed clash between India and Pakistan, after India launched Operation Sindoor on the intervening night of May 6 and 7, came to a close after both countries agreed to a ceasefire on May 10. Interestingly, Trump announced that ceasefire even before the Indian and Pakistani sides issued statements. In his post and remarks afterwards, he emphatically took credit for maintaining peace between the two countries and even wrote that the United States mediated talks between India and Pakistan.

This claim by the US President led to several questions from the Opposition to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party on whether India “opened the doors to third-party mediation“. India downplayed the US’s role in brokering the deal. According to a Hindu report from May 13, Trump, in an in-person meeting at the White House, claimed that the US did not just ‘broker’ the ceasefire deal but averted a major nuclear conflict. The US president reportedly ‘threatened’ to stop trade with both countries if they refused to de-escalate. But those within the government, privy to the discussions, told the news outlet that there had been “no reference to trade” during de-escalation talks.

On a June 18 NDTV broadcast, senior journalist and the channel’s managing editor, Shiv Aroor, did a segment on United States President Donald Trump’s ‘u-turn’.

“Trump has changed his tune. After speaking to Prime Minister Modi for 35 minutes on the phone today, a big ‘u-turn’ by the US President, who last month had tried to take complete credit for the ceasefire after Operation Sindoor. Trump has said it was Modi who stopped the war on the Indian side, but he still says that he was the one who stopped the war on the Pakistan side. That [latter] part could actually be true because it was after all Pakistan that went running to the United States, and then the US had told Pakistan to get on the hotline and ask for a ceasefire from India. This is Trump taking the biggest u-turn of the season and saying, it was India, it was the Indian Prime Minister that caused the ceasefire from the Indian side and stopped the war…” Aroor said.

After showing Trump’s statement on this issue, he goes on to say, “Trump changes his stance after all and it took a 35 minute conversation with the Indian Prime Mister where he was very mildly told that this is credit that you cannot take, this was something that India imposed on Pakistan, not giving them a choice. And there is Trump giving that credit to the Indian Prime Minister”.

News agency Press Trust of India (PTI) was among the first to report that US President Trump backtracked from his initial claim that he brokered the ceasefire deal between India and Pakistan. They cited him as saying that “two ‘very smart’ leaders of India and Pakistan ‘decided’ not to continue a war that could have turned nuclear”. The report was later updated with more information, where it was mentioned that this comment could be “seen at variance with his claims over a dozen times in the last few weeks” where he took credit for the ceasefire between the neighbouring nuclear-armed nations. (Archives 1, 2)

Several other news outlets, such as The Hindu, NDTV, Indian Express, National Herald, Vartha Bharati, published the same PTI wire. (Archives 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Other outlets such as the Times of India, Hindustan Times, India TV, Firstpost and Business Standard also reported that Trump did a ‘u-turn’ by saying that the leaders of India and Pakistan were ‘very smart’ and ‘decided’ to stop the war. (Archives 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Is it a U-Turn?

We carefully heard Trump’s statement, which was referenced by the above media outlets, and found that this was from a flagpole installation event at the White House’s South Lawn on June 18. A reporter asked him what the US President wished to achieve diplomatically from his upcoming lunch with Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir and that’s when Trump talks about the conflict. Here’s his statement verbatim:

“Well, I stopped a war… between Pakistan… I love Pakistan. I think Modi is a fantastic man. I spoke to him last night. We’re going to make a trade deal with Modi of India. But I stopped the war between Pakistan and India [sic]. This man (Asim Munir) was extremely influential in stopping it, from the Pakistan side. Modi, from the India side, and others. And they were going at it. And they’re both nuclear countries. I got it stopped. I don’t think I had one story… did I have one story written about? I stopped a war between two major nations, major nuclear nations. I don’t think I had a story written about it… but that’s okay. You know why? The people know”.

Evidently, Trump’s words can hardly be called a u-turn. The American President reiterates 4 times that it was he who stopped the war. He gives the Indian PM the same credit as Pakistan’s army chief for being ‘influential’ in stopping the war. But he emphasises his own role in ghis. A mere mention of the two leaders does not imply that he went back on his word, especially when he leaves no room for doubt that he had a huge role to play in it.

Note that his June 18 statement is not too different from his May 10 statement on the ceasefire wherein he congratulated the two countries for using “common sense and great intelligence”.

It would be fair to say that Indian news outlets may have read too much into Trump’s latest statement. Nowhere does he go back on his stance nor can this be seen as a softening of his earlier approach. He is still very much of the opinion that he “got it stopped” and repeats it more than once.

It would be misleading to say that Trump mentioning Modi in the same vein as Munir is akin to him doing a u-turn on his earlier approach.

The post Did Trump make a ‘u-turn’ on his role in the India‑Pakistan ceasefire, as news outlets claimed? appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Oishani Bhattacharya.

It’s kind of always been there. I’m actually classically trained in piano and clarinet and I was part of a singing group as a very young kid, but I’m self-taught as a guitarist. That was a lot of gradually finding music that resonated and learning how to play as much as I could over years and years. A lot of learning by ear. Not learning from sheet music. When I moved to Chicago, I gradually started meeting more people over a period of years who I wanted to play with, at the same time as I started realizing that some of the music I was working on needed other people to join in order for the song to feel complete. When I started playing and started entertaining the idea of being a working musician, I never thought of collaboration entering the picture. I always imagined it as a solo endeavor, and generally a solo acoustic guitar endeavor. And in short, Chicago has changed that.

I wanted to ask about Chicago and the Chicago music scene! Was your album before this one the first time you’ve collaborated with other musicians on a record?

It was the first album with the band on the whole thing. But there’s not a single solo song, per se.

Yeah, the Chicago music scene is so strong. I think part of what makes this album stand out from the self-titled album is that a lot of the music came together playing it live on tour with my dear trio bandmates. Sam Wagster plays pedal steel, Tyler Damon plays drums. And those are also the Chicagoans who play on the first band song that came out on an album of mine. So, by the time that we had recorded the music for this album, and the foundational parts of the music–metal steel drums, bass, that sort of thing–the music that made it on the record by and large was music that we had played in concert as much as we could. And I’m lucky I get to play with people who I love who also are older than me. You know, Sam and Tyler are each like roughly 10 and 20 years older than I am. And I can’t really believe that because they bring so much to their instruments in ways that I would be hard-pressed to imagine people in my age bracket–I’m about to turn 28–would be able to bring to the music.

Does that feel like mentorship or does it feel like full on collaboration? And does it fuel your creativity?

I think both. I’m definitely pretty uneasy with the idea of being a band leader in what might be a more traditional sense. I don’t like to take solos, I don’t like to play in a flashy manner. I think the way that I play prevents me from playing in a more superficially flashy or pyrotechnic fashion anyway, because the foundation of my playing comes from what people might call a folk fingerstyle guitar, which is a completely different toolkit from playing fast jazz guitar single-note leads. So the way that we each approach our instruments, we each come at it from somewhat of a sidelong way. Tyler is such a deep listener of so much music, including jazz, but is not per se trained as a jazz drummer. We each have these ways of playing our instruments that strike me as being pretty active, but also as a whole, the music feels pretty active. Going in to record this music, I tend to think of it as being modular, in that we add more pieces to a certain song in a certain setting. Then the whole is filling up the same amount of space. How people are filling this whole changes a little bit from song to song. Because, as loosey goosey as this might sound, it’s always just about finding out what the music wants.

Do you have intuition or do you have narratives you structure that become ideas of what you want the song to be like? Or as it comes to you, you have this sort of instinct of, “Oh, that’s not what I want it to be?”

I think it’s some of both. I think the only extent to which I could say there’s a narrative is in terms of, does a given song produce in me an emotional impact? In short, do I choke up or cry at some point when I’m listening to a mix or something like that? Maybe that response will change at some point, but generally that’s always the response I’ve looked for.

You look for the emotional?

Yeah. It might not be choking up. It might be feeling some kind of energy that is somewhat hard to describe. But it always connects to some kind of emotion. Or more than that, some kind of emotional ambiguity. Like a sense that there are a lot of different things happening and they could be difficult to untangle, but they’re all there, even if you don’t necessarily know what all those different pieces are. I think there was a time when I was seeking that and also seeking technical perfection. And now technical perfection seems not just asymptotic, but that it runs the risk of sacrificing the thing that could give other people meaning or an entry point to the music.

This album seems like it did come from a heavy place. You mentioned the death of your friend, jaimie branch in your liner notes, for instance. Is it difficult for grief to be a part of the music? Is that part of the emotion you’re searching for?

Yeah, I mean, I think if it’s not moving you, it’s hard to justify it. Maybe that’s just because I’m a sensitive B-O-I boi, but I tend to feel like most of the things that I take in–it could be a meal, it could be a book or a movie or something–most of the time, if something leaves an impact, it’s leaving an emotional impact. And it seems like it’s preferable then to try to tamp that down for the sake of something I wouldn’t myself understand because it would be a different goal than I would have. And you know, sometimes I have to take breaks during shows. There’s a song that we play in Jaimie Branch’s memory, “Dayenu.” That’s usually a song that if any song in the set makes me take a break to collect myself after, it’s usually that song, but that feels like how it wants to go, you know? Buttoning it up isn’t going to help you.

It seems like you’ve really been able to let your intuition take the lead and since you also do some improv, I’m wondering if it took a while to get to this place where you are now, where you’re accepting of everything that happens in the music?

The first recording sessions for this music, I kind of had to repair my relationship to playing guitar; which then happened again about a year later. I think [in the way that] intuition is natural to some degree, I had to teach myself how to trust it. I think partially as a function of some of the things I was trying to work through musically when this music started coming together and some of the things I was working through personally when this music started coming together, and also as it developed as well. But regardless, intuition is a pretty big guiding force.

What is the balance between improvisation and composing for you?

It’s pretty poor. It’s funny you ask. On the one hand, there’s a song, “Cracking the Jaw,” on this album, which is pretty much totally composed from my perspective. But my bandmates are more or less improvising around the structure that my music provides. And there’s the title track, which my playing happens to provide a loose structure, but when we were recording what became that song, I was thinking about it more in terms of spontaneous composition rather than arriving with something fully composed.

I tend to think of improvisation as spontaneous composition anyway. I think partially in part because of my own toolkit and my own limitations. I don’t feel like I’m all that good at playing fast. The guitars I play, I often have them set up in ways that in short are just kind of hard to play. I use heavy strings and use all these mode tunings that sometimes are kind of odd.

I’ve worked with people who are really good at understanding what a song wants, and then they can either have me bring it out or they can bring it out themselves. I trust my ability to help guide something in a certain direction that might be. I think particularly in a live setting.

There’s a William T. Vollmann quote, I really want to dig it up, but he said something to the effect of, “At least my mistakes are my mistakes.” And the idea that he’s a writer and he had the idea that no artwork will ever be perfect in some quantifiable objective measure. I think it informs a lot of how I’ve approached that more recently.

I wanted to go back to your writing, because your music is mostly instrumental. I know we’ve talked about you wanting to sing at some point, but I’m curious about your writing and if those are separate things for you or if you ever see them interweaving.

I’ve actually demoed a singing record that I hope will come out with a good home someday. I realized that I think a lot of what my guitar playing is doing, or the instrumental work that I’m doing, regardless of what instrument it is, is filling the role of a vocal line. I think a lot of the music that I resonate with in terms of instrumental music tends to have a more active quality. The sense of there being a narrative. I think it comes from the fact that whatever music I’m playing in a group context or on my own, it fills the same function as if there were a singer there.

I started playing instrumental music in part because I was a shy singer. I shared a room and my poor brother would listen to me practicing guitar with headphones on, and I just did not want to sing. Sometimes I would sing quietly on my bed at home if I were the only person home, and only then until somebody else got home. But I think it bears on how I approach this music, even though it seems different on some level. The same way that I have a creative nonfiction degree and the kinds of things I was exposed to in terms of how to structure a given thing and figuring out what kind of narrative something wants.

What path led you to where you are today?

This feels sappy, but it feels worth mentioning, that a lot of the things that have happened musically and a lot of the work that I’ve done, it often seemed that various things would seem insurmountable, and then one way or another, they worked out. And the process in my experience, though I know it’s not the case for everyone, has been pretty organic, pretty slow and steady. I would just hope that speaking as someone who was once a younger person reading The Creative Independent interviews, thinking, “Oh man, maybe I can be like that person someday, doing something like what this person is doing.”

Coming from no meaningful musical training in my main instrument and no deep financial pockets or things of that nature, weird, “nepo baby” style connections… Obviously there are a lot of different factors at play that are important to be mindful of, especially with the whole fascism issue going on and the, we call it an omni-crisis, I guess, politically. But I can’t help but think that the sorts of things that I’m doing are not out of anybody’s reach. And if anyone reading this ever has a question about that sort of thing, they can hit me up any time.

Do you feel like things were accessible to you when you were starting out?

I reached out to a lot of people on the internet and wrote them emails saying something like, “Hey, I’m Eli, I’m 17. I want to do what you do when I grow up. Can we be friends?” and just enough of those people wrote back in kind with some kind of encouragement. And now those people are continuing to, by and large, blaze their creative trails. Some at progressively larger scales, and for others, it’s different. But either way, just doing whatever their thing happens to be at a given time. I grew up in Houston, and even just meeting a few people who had some sense of the same musical interests felt impossible. It’s a surprise that I started meeting people in Houston who I felt like I could work with on some level after I moved away. But through that, I started reaching out to people and I would wait for these people’s replies in my inbox and open them terrified that they’d say, “What are you doing, kid? Go away. You’re 17 and I’m about to go on tour in Germany,” or something. And of course it never happened because… Well, I suppose that I don’t even need to explain it, but I had that fear.

But that was really just about building some kind of community, whether it’s on your own or with other people. And, of course, Chicago has so much of that infrastructure built in already and this music really benefits from that. But also sort of to the earlier point, it happens in so many different ways; I just tend to feel like there’s never any harm in reaching out.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Mána Taylor.

…Those who control the water, control the (fill in the blank, but hint hint, ‘world’)

…Those who control the money, control the (fill in the blank, but hint hint, ‘world’)

…Those who control the media, control the (fill in the blank, but hint hint, ‘world’)

…Those who control outer space, control the (fill in the blank, but hint hint, ‘world’)

…Those who control the data, control the (fill in the blank, but hint hint, ‘world’)

Throwing in that “Big data” fishnet just a decade ago was the big new addition to the scientific method: Try to find even the most vague or minimally-recognized studies, and then let the computer develop the patterns.

Ahh, was it David Quammen or some of the other thousands of sources I have utilized over a 45 year period that exposed me to that rare but highly interesting factoid that a woman’s daily diary entrees while living in Costa Rica allowed science to research why the birthrate had fallen and the survival rate had plummented for the golden toad.

She catalogued the changing cloud and mist and fog cover in her homeland, and over a thirty year period, she meticulously recorded all number of tidbits of observation, including that reduction in the clouds hitting the treeline.

Do the Google AI search, and nothing pops up.

It’s pure lies, these AI generated responses: Quoting below.

While the story of a woman’s diary specifically detailing the golden toad’s decline and its link to reduced mist in Costa Rica might be fictional or anecdotal, the core issue of the golden toad’s extinction and its relation to changing cloud forest conditions is well-documented.

Here’s a breakdown of how changes in mist and fog likely contributed to the golden toad’s disappearance:

1. Golden Toads and Their Cloud Forest Habitat:

• The golden toad was endemic to a small, high-altitude region within the Monteverde Cloud Forest in Costa Rica, an environment known for its constant mist, high humidity, and a rainy season.
• These specific conditions were crucial for the golden toad’s breeding cycle and survival.

2. Climate Change and Reduced Mist:

• Climate change has altered weather patterns globally, and the Monteverde Cloud Forest was not spared.
• Researchers have observed a decrease in mist and moisture levels in the cloud forest, potentially due to rising temperatures and shifting cloud patterns.
• This reduction in mist could have made the environment drier, impacting the golden toad’s delicate skin and potentially leading to dehydration.

3. Impact on Breeding:

• Golden toads relied on rainwater pools for breeding.
• Reduced mist and rainfall likely led to the drying up of these crucial breeding pools, hindering the toad’s ability to reproduce successfully.

4. The Chytrid Fungus:

• Changes in climate, including drier conditions, could have created a more favorable environment for the chytrid fungus, a deadly pathogen that affects amphibians.
• This fungus attacks the skin of frogs and toads, disrupting their ability to absorb water and electrolytes, ultimately leading to death.

In Summary:

While a diary account remains unsubstantiated, the scientific consensus points towards climate change, leading to a reduction in mist and rainfall, as a significant factor in the golden toad’s extinction. These altered environmental conditions likely impacted the toad’s ability to breed and may have increased its vulnerability to the deadly chytrid fungus.

*****

So, my own Substacks (I have three under pseudonyms) have varying levels of so-called rant and railing and deep deep disregard for most authorities. A few hundred subscribers, and very few are paid ones.

Because I do these “news” headline “essays,” my own news feeds have been corrupted with many times the opposite sort of sources I would go to for reliable information — Israeli rags, USA mainstream, European mainstream, defense/offensive professional journals, Bloomberg and Fortune, et al.

What happens, though, is a reverse osmosis sort of play on the hourly news that gets fed to me via Bing, Yahoo, AP, UPI, CNN, and the list goes on.

It’s not exactly a deep and sophisticated exercise that might end up on Dissident Voice, but I’ll attempt one now:

1. Forgone conclusions, and this is the techno-fascist world controlling the narrative and that narrative is controlled by the oligarchs and the virus of a shifting baseline disorder and rampant disregard for a precautionary principle and the value of looking at intended and unintended (rare) negative effects of these titans of capital and their Brave Banal Evil Doers, the scientists, engineers, fabricators, technologists, et al.

Exhibit A (infinity is really that number):

Looks and sounds like a geek, such a nice sweet looking banal sort of fellow?

• Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says in the next 5-10 years, AI will disturb more jobs
• He urged teens to become code ninjas to deal with the AI-driven world
• He also said that the youngest generation, Gen Alpha, must start experimenting with AI as soon as possible

As the world dashes into an AI-driven future, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has a clear message for teens: learn now or be left behind. Hassabis leads Google DeepMind, the advanced research lab behind the company’s most high-end AI developments, including the Gemini chatbot. The lab is also spearheading Google’s efforts toward achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) — a yet-unrealised form of AI capable of human-level reasoning. At the recent Google I/O developer conference, Hassabis said DeepMind is likely less than a decade away from building AGI. As he works in such an environment, he certainly knows what form AI will take in the near future. (India Today, of all rags I get in my feeds)

There are many many paywalls now, so anything from the NYT, well, I have to do end-arounds sometimes to read the entire pieces, but headlines and sub-headlines do the trick:

At Amazon, Some Coders Say Their Jobs Have Begun to Resemble Warehouse Work

Pushed to use artificial intelligence, software developers at the e-commerce giant say they must work faster and have less time to think. Others welcome the shift.

Go to Reddit on this one headline and you get all sorts of opinions and personal experiences with codes.

I’ve written much about Amazon, and I even organized with SEIU against Amazon’s warehouse unsafe warehouse conditions and their anti-union stance.

But the geeks and all those soccer moms and geek dads want their children not to marry cowboys but to marry coders and software engineers, or drone impresarios: A “17-year-old designed a cheaper, more efficient drone. The Department of Defense just awarded him $23,000 for it.”

Dual Use, man, dual use which is always Capitalist Abuse and Military Murder Hardware: Cooper Taylor, 17, aims to revolutionize the drone industry with a new design.

Taylor designed a motor-tilting mechanism to lower manufacturing cost and increase efficiency.

Taylor has spent the last year optimizing a type of drone that’s being used more and more in agriculture, disaster relief, wildlife conservation, search-and-rescue efforts, and medical deliveries.

All drone technology is for murdering, in the end.

And what fuels these death machines, these genocide facilitators? Geeks in high school robotics Olympics.

A breathtaking flyover of nearly every United States Air Force fighter and bomber jet soared during a Florida air show Saturday, stunning footage of the historic aerial display showed.

Seven of the top military aircraft, called the “Freedom Flyover,” united as “one unstoppable force” for thousands of people to take in over Memorial Day weekend at the Hyundai Air and Sea Show in Miami Beach.

*****

Somehow it ALWAYS comes down for me from these feeds back to the Jewish State of Murdering Raping Starving Polluting Poisoning Occupied Palestine:

As thousands of Israeli nationalists and religious Jews on Monday marked Jerusalem Day, which celebrates Israel’s 1967 capture of east Jerusalem, some chanted “Death to Arabs” while marching through Muslim neighborhoods. Protesters, including an Israeli member of parliament, also reportedly stormed a compound belonging to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.

[Oh, you can call these Jews in Israel Right-wing Nationalists, or pro-settler extermists, but they are in the Jewish State of Israel, and they are Jewish. Calling them Jewish is not anti-semitic, and leaving out the term “zionist” is not an error of omission.]

Last year’s procession, which came during the first year of the war in Gaza, saw ultranationalist Israelis attack a Palestinian journalist in the Old City and call for violence against Palestinians. Four years ago, the march helped set off an 11-day war in Gaza.

Tour buses carrying young ultranationalist Jews lined up near entrances to the Old City, bringing hundreds from outside Jerusalem, including settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Police said they had detained a number of individuals, without specifying, and “acted swiftly to prevent violence, confrontations, and provocations.”

*****

And, the IOF, Israeli Occupation Forces, well, they do teach many US police departments on “crowd suppression,” pressure point holds, subbing peaceful protestors, and strong-arming old ladies and teens.

And, as always, NBC, or whichever mainstream and corporate media outfit, will always suppress the reality — Some fear excessive use of force will rise as the DOJ drops oversight of police departments.

George Floyd, Michael Brown?

“It is important to not overstate what consent decrees do,” said Jin Hee Lee with the Legal Defense Fund, referring to the power of federal courts to enforce orders. “They are very important and oftentimes necessary to force police departments to change their policies, to change their practices,” she added. “But consent decrees were never the end all, be all.”

*****

Then you get this Jewish Fervor, and who the hell wants to defend the Poison Ivy School, but you have to under the Rapist in Chief Trump and his henchman, Stephen Miller:

At the Harvard Kennedy School, the Trump administration’s attempt to revoke Harvard’s eligibility to enroll international students — temporarily blocked in court — could eliminate nearly 60 percent of the student body.

*****

Until the last half-decade, the majestic lesser flamingo had four African breeding sites: two salt pans in Botswana and Namibia, a soda lake in Tanzania, and an artificial dam outside South Africa’s historic diamond-mining town of Kimberley.

Now it only has three.

And then, I get tons of wildlife and climate news: “Lesser flamingos lose one of their only four African breeding sites to sewage.” Emblematic at how messed up the polluting Homo consumopethicus is. Sewage. Shit.

This sort of stuff, all these headlines, all these stories, seemingly disconnected, unrelated in theme, well, the common theme is clear — Capitalism is a Cancer Supported by Economic Wars and Genocide and a Mafia that is Global in Its Reach. Is that a good enough connecting headline?

*****

Thank goodness that I have writers for Substack who put it all into perspective, how this world is up shit creek illustrated by the War on People in Palestine.

The Poem “Nine,” from Palestine Will Be Free Substack:

I tended my garden with great care —
Olives, thyme, dates, sage, and rosemary there.
Well before fajr and long after isha’s call,
No effort was spared in looking after them all.

From tiny seeds to flowers in full bloom,
I watched them glow in sun’s majestic light.
And as the first buds of the olives came to life,
Every glance, every day was an endless delight.

Wearied days would vanish at their sight
Each bloom I touched made my mornings bright
I would count my blessings: one, two, three, four…
Up to ten — then countless more.

Then came the fire that scorched it all —
Thyme, dates, sage, and rosemary gone.
One gnarly olive barely hangs by a thread;
My waking moments are soaked in tears, eyes red.

Now with every breath, a prayer escapes:
Protect my olive — please keep it safe.
It’s the last remnant of a heart so full, a life well lived,
In service of my garden, my people, and God the Esteemed.

You blessed Yaqub with a garden vast,
Only to separate him from Yusuf, the rose of his heart.
Yaqub complained, yearned, and wept till blindness veiled his eyes
You, the Merciful, answered his prayers and restored old ties.

So bless me, as You did Yaqub in the end —
Restore the coolness of my eyes, O Ibrahim’s Friend.
“For I too have the gift of song which gives me courage to complain,
But ah! ‘tis none but God Himself whom I, in sorrow, must arraign!”

Your infinite wisdom is beyond my grasp,
So, to Your rope of hope I must clasp.
“The lessons of patience I teach my heart,
As though to night’s separation I show a false part.”

*****

Thank goodness for International 360, with a whole lot of stories aggregated-curated: Only Total Collapse Will Rouse Humanity from Its Suicidal Sleepwalk

From BettMedia:

Only Total Collapse Will Rouse Humanity from Its Suicidal Sleepwalk

Editorial Comment:

I have been issuing warnings since the genocide began and every nation and institution failed to stop it. Not one invoked the appropriate legal mechanisms designed for such a crisis that would have ended abuse of veto, ousted Israel from the United Nations and imposed sanctions on the genocidal entity. I am pleased to see more activists understanding the extent of manipulation and deception we have all been subjected to.

Previously I said,

• There is no hope for the world to be found in any government, institution or movement that can normalize ties with or fail to stop a genocidal oppressor.
• There can be no faith in leaders that place interests above moral principles.
• There is no salvation to be found standing with those too cowardly to act in the face of murderous criminality.
• The hope of humanity rests solely on the shoulders of each awakening individual and on movements in the grassroots bases who have never lost touch with reality and are willing to defend life at all costs.

Karim has brilliantly and succinctly presented the many facets of our present dilemma in the article below.

Once we abandon fantasy and begin with these truths, realistic solutions and avenues of dissent, resistance and revolution can constellate and finally manifest.

A.V.

BettBeat Media

As Gaza’s children burn while the world watches, it becomes clear: only climate catastrophe, nuclear armageddon, or World War III may force humanity to abandon Western capitalism’s suicidal path.

The brutal death march of global capitalism does not pause for our lamentations. It grinds forward with mechanistic certainty, reducing human bodies to raw material and human aspirations to market commodities. We stand now at the precipice of a darkness so profound that our collective imagination fails to grasp its dimensions.

Gaza Exposed the Multipolar Fantasy

Let us dispense with comforting illusions. The mythologies we have constructed about saviors – whether BRICS nations, ‘multipolar world orders’, institutions of international law, or benevolent statesmen – have disintegrated before our eyes.

As Gaza burns and its children scream under collapsing concrete, we witness Russia making backroom deals with the architects of genocide. As Palestinian bodies pile in makeshift morgues, China issues empty declarations at the United Nations while its trade with the genocidal regime continues uninterrupted.

These are not the actions of counterweights to empire. They are the maneuvers of players within the same global system, differing perhaps in position but not in fundamental nature. They have shown themselves to be integral components of the very machinery we hoped they would dismantle.

We have watched, with desperate hope, the Palestinians stand against overwhelming military force, the Lebanese resisting occupation, Ibrahim Traore challenging neocolonial structures, Syrians and Yemenis enduring apocalyptic bombardment.

We projected onto them our desperate yearning for liberation from the imperialist hellscape spreading like wildfire across our planet. But they cannot do it alone, and our delegation of hope to others is itself a form of moral abdication.

The Frightening Truth is: It Really Comes Down to Us

The terrible truth we must confront is this: the responsibility is ours. The revolution required is not national but global, because the capitalist system has metastasized globally.

It has burrowed deep into the institutional structures of every society, captured the regulatory mechanisms that might constrain it, corrupted the informational systems that might expose it, and weaponized the technological systems that might liberate us.

Consider the grotesque spectacle of our current moment: we watch genocide in real-time on social media platforms owned by billionaires who fund that same genocide, we march in permitted protests that change nothing, we sign petitions that disappear into administrative voids. Meanwhile, the machinery of death continues unabated, and the architects of suffering retire to coastal mansions and mountain retreats after receiving fifty standing ovations for speeches that are nothing more than celebrations of mass murder.

The ruling classes have constructed a system of control so comprehensive, so technologically sophisticated, and so psychologically insidious that most cannot even perceive the depth of their enslavement. The surveillance apparatus tracks our movements and predicts our thoughts. The military-industrial complex develops weapons of terrifying precision to eliminate those who resist too effectively. The propaganda system manufactures consent with algorithmic efficiency.

All Wish to Sit at the Blood-Soaked Table of Imperialism

As vanessa beeley and Fiorella Isabel so meticulously lay out for us, Putin, for all his anti-Western rhetoric, demonstrates through his actions that he seeks merely better terms within the imperial arrangement, not its dissolution. His government works in tacit coordination with Israel while claiming to stand against Western hegemony. This is not resistance; it is negotiation for a better position at the blood-soaked table of imperialism.

And what of China? Does it dream of global equality? Let’s rephrase, do ruling elites anywhere envision a future where they stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the peasants in the villages they dominate? History speaks to us with terrible clarity. The powerful do not relinquish power voluntarily. Systems of exploitation do not reform themselves out of existence. The capitalist machine — whether neoliberal or state capitalism — will not decommission itself out of ethical awakening.

We have already weathered global catastrophes that should have taught us these lessons. World War I reduced a generation of young men to shredded flesh in muddy trenches, yet we learned nothing. World War II revealed the industrial-scale horror humans could inflict upon one another, yet we learned nothing. The grinding machinery reassembled itself, adapted, and continued its relentless accumulation.

World War III

The terrifying conclusion becomes unavoidable: only the total breakdown of global society will create the conditions for fundamental transformation. This is not a wish but a recognition of historical pattern. The entrenchment is too deep, the control too complete, the psychological captivity too thorough for anything less than systemic collapse to break the spell.

What form will this breakdown take? Perhaps nuclear winter that eliminates most of humanity. Perhaps the collapse of ecological systems that sustain human life. Perhaps the return of fascistic brutality in World War III as soldiers march through our streets, rounding up our women and children to violate their dignity and take away their innocence while the men disappear into torture camps. The specific manifestation matters less than the certainty of its arrival if our course remains unchanged.

This is the darkness we must stare into without flinching. Humanity appears incapable of changing direction without first experiencing the catastrophic consequences of its current trajectory. Even high-definition genocide—burning children and prisoner rapes streamed directly to our iPhones—fails to move us to effective action. We seem determined to learn only through even more extreme suffering, to change only when our current path becomes literally impossible to continue.

Resistance

Yet within this terrible recognition lies a seed of possibility. If we understand the machinery of our destruction with unflinching clarity, if we abandon the comfortable myths that absolve us of responsibility, if we recognize that no external force will save us from ourselves – perhaps then we might begin the work of genuine resistance.

Not the performative — flag-waving, song-singing, tweet-sharing — resistance that leaves power structures intact, but the fundamental reimagining of human society. Not the delegation of hope to distant leaders, but the reclamation of our collective agency. Not the comfortable protest that returns home for dinner, but the sustained commitment to dismantling systems of death.

The machinery of global capitalism does not pause for our lamentations, but neither is it invulnerable to our determined opposition. The question remains whether we will summon the courage to oppose it before the breakdown comes, or whether we will continue sleepwalking until we awaken amid the ruins.

– Karim

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

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As he has promoted the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, has lamented the toll that processed foods have taken on the health of Americans, in particular Native Americans.

Prepackaged foods have “mass poisoned” tribal communities, he said last month when he met with tribal leaders and visited a Native American health clinic in Arizona.

Weeks later, in testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, he said processed foods had resulted in a “genocide” among Native Americans, who disproportionately live in places where there are few or no grocery stores.

“One of my big priorities will be getting good food — high-quality food, traditional foods — onto the reservation because processed foods for American Indians is poison,” Kennedy told the committee. Healthy food is key to combating the high rates of chronic disease in tribal communities, he said.

Yet even as the president tasks Kennedy’s agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture with improving healthy eating programs, the USDA has terminated the very program that dozens of tribal food banks say has helped them provide fresh, locally produced food that is important to their traditions and cultures.

That program — the USDA’s Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement program — began under President Joe Biden in late 2021 as a response to challenges accessing food that were magnified by the pandemic. Its goal was to boost purchases from local farmers and ranchers, and the funding went to hundreds of food banks across the country, including 90 focused on serving tribes.

In March, the Trump administration decided the program did not align with its priorities. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins defended the cut of a half-billion dollars by calling the program a remnant of the COVID era.

The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in a statement, a USDA spokesperson said the department continues to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars through more than a dozen other nutrition programs that help families meet their nutrition needs. For tribal communities, the spokesperson said, that includes the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations for low-income households.

When that program started in the 1970s, it offered processed foods colloquially known as “commodities.” Over the years, the government has added salmon, frozen chicken, produce and other more nutritious options for tribes to include in recipients’ monthly food packages. But few tribes who participate in the Food Distribution Program can purchase food directly from farmers and ranchers, as they were able to do with the now-canceled grant program. Instead, most choose from the USDA’s list of approved and available foods.

Kelli Case, an attorney for the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative at the University of Arkansas, said the program cut by the Trump administration was widely considered an overwhelming success because tribes selected foods based on their nutritional needs and “what people actually want to eat.”

“Having the opportunity to tailor a program makes a huge difference,” she said.

On reservations, the problems addressed by the now-canceled program had been an issue for generations, perpetuated by a string of federal policies, Case added. The pandemic merely “highlighted and exacerbated those issues,” she said.

For instance: In the 1800s, tribes in the West began losing access to traditional food sources — such as berries, salmon and bison — even though treaties promised tribes the right to hunt and fish. Some were removed from their homelands.

The federal government instead provided tribal members with food rations — flour, lard, sugar, coffee and other staples. At the same time, the forcible removal of Native children to boarding schools upended families’ ability to pass along knowledge about the foods they hunted and harvested.

The now-canceled grants helped fill a void, tribes said.

On the Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation, in an especially remote stretch of Montana, Jason Belcourt said he believed the Chippewa-Cree Tribe was finally getting closer to providing nutritious, local food to every tribal member in need. He expects the tribe’s USDA funding for local food purchases to run out within weeks.

The funding — $400,000 in the past several years — helped the tribe buy beef and produce from local ranchers and farmers. The money supplied roughly 250 households on a reservation where the nearest supermarket is about 20 miles away.

“We wanted to make sure that we didn’t turn away anybody,” Belcourt said. “There are families that go without meals; there are kids that go without meals.”

The tribe also used the money to help harvest bison from the tribe’s herd, which Belcourt said has “done wonders, not only in terms of the food value.” The harvests became community events where younger tribal members learned how their ancestors butchered and used the buffalo. A sense of tribal identity was being restored, he said.

“There’s a lot of cultural sharing. There’s a lot of remembrance from the old timers of what their grandparents told them and how to use the buffalo,” Belcourt said. “And, believe it or not, there’s some healing that’s going on.”

The harvests will continue, Belcourt said. But it’s unclear how he will make up for the loss of $150,000 in funding that the USDA previously awarded the tribe for local food purchases over the next year.

Other tribes are similarly concerned about the future.

The Walker River Paiute in Nevada was the first to receive one of the grants to source local food, including $249,091 in 2022. The community, 115 miles southeast of Reno, used most of the money on locally sourced produce and eggs, according to the USDA. Of the reservation’s 830 residents, both Native American and not, 40% had received food purchased using the grant, according to the tribe.

“I truly believe no one knows the needs of our tribal citizens better than the tribe,” Amber Torres, then the tribe’s chairman, said in a news release.

In late March, a dozen nonprofits that advocate for Native Americans sent a letter to USDA Secretary Rollins, urging her to reinstate the “critical” program as a step toward respecting the sovereign status of tribes. At a recent meeting with USDA officials, tribal leaders again emphasized that they want a say over the food distributed on their reservations.

Tribal communities still have access to the handful of federal food programs. However, last year, the Government Accountability Office, the watchdog arm of Congress, found that some posed barriers to people’s ability to get the food they want or need.

For example, individuals who accept the commodity program’s offerings cannot also receive assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps. As a result, a household’s needs can go unmet. Sometimes SNAP offers essential cooking ingredients — oil, seasoning or yeast — that the commodity program may not provide, according to the study.

(The local food program was not included in the GAO report.)

On the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana, the USDA’s local food program had become a reliable fixture, especially since the federal commodity program was paused there, said Tescha Hawley, who is Gros Ventre, or Aaniiih, and a social worker on the reservation. Structural problems had shuttered the building where the commodity program food was warehoused.

A nonprofit Hawley founded, Day Eagle Hope Project, helped her tribe secure $2 million from the USDA to buy fresh local food and process bison meat from its herd. Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribal members who are capable of gathering wild, nutrient-rich berries exchange them for payment through the grant. She distributed the food first from a shipping container on her property and later a community center.

Over the past few years, the tribe and her nonprofit have distributed thousands of pounds of food. She anticipates the money that remains from past grant funding cycles will run out this winter. For people who can get to a grocery store, up to 45 miles away from some of the reservation’s communities, many will have to make SNAP benefits stretch at a time when food prices are rising.

“So that means even less food for the month,” Hawley said. “People will go without.”

Belcourt said he has begun seeking other grants, and a tribal staffer makes runs to collect food donations in Havre, more than 20 miles away, and Great Falls, about 90 miles away.

“We don't have a Plan B,” Belcourt said of the abruptly canceled grant. “Given the short notice, it’s tough to find a funder in that timeframe.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Mary Hudetz.

Then the plane’s whir gave way to the swarm’s buzz. It was 1952, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture was conducting a series of field tests with male screwworm flies that had been sterilized with gamma radiation. The experiment’s aim was to get them to mate with their female counterparts, reduce the species’ ability to reproduce, and gradually shrink the population — and its screw-shaped larvae’s propensity to burrow into living mammals before swiftly killing their host — into oblivion. 

It didn’t fully work, but the population did diminish. So the team of scientists tried again; this time in an even more remote location — Curaçao, an island in the Dutch Caribbean. That quickly proved to be successful, a welcome development after a decades-long battle by scientists, farmers, and government officials against the fly, which was costing the U.S. economy millions annually and endangering colossal numbers of livestock, wildlife, and even the occasional human. Within months, the screwworm population on Curaçao fell, and the tactic would be replicated at scale. 

The USDA took its extermination campaign first throughout much of the south, and then all the way west to California. From then on, planes loaded with billions of sterilized insects were also routinely flown over Mexico and Central America. By the 1970s, most traces of the screwworm had vanished from the U.S., and by the early 1990s, it had all but disappeared from across the southern border and throughout the southernmost region of North America.  

Since 1994, the USDA has partnered with the Panamanian government to control and wipe out established populations all the way down to the country’s southeastern Darién province, where the Comisión Panamá–Estados Unidos para la Erradicación y Prevención del Gusano Barrenador del Ganado, or COPEG, now maintains what’s colloquially called the “Great American Worm Wall.” Each week, millions of sterilized screwworms bred in a nearby production facility are dropped by plane over the rainforest along the Panama-Colombia border — an invisible screwworm biological barrier zone, complete with round-the-clock human-operated checkpoints and inspections. But questions are now surfacing about its efficacy. 

The pest is attracted to open wounds as small as tick bites and mucous membranes, such as nasal passages, where the female fly lays her eggs. A single female can lay up to 300 eggs at a time, and has the capacity to produce thousands during her short lifespan. Those eggs then hatch into larvae that burrow into the host animals with sharp mouth hooks and feed on living flesh. 

To save the host, the larvae must be removed from the infested tissue. Otherwise the infestation can cause serious harm, and can even be fatal within a matter of days.

Female flies generally mate only once in their lifespan, but can continuously lay more than one batch of eggs every few days, which is why the sterile insect technique has long been considered a fail-safe tactic, when accompanied by surveillance, host treatment and quarantine, for wiping out populations. The best way to prevent infestation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is to avoid exposure.

About 20 years after the “Worm Wall” was created, the screwworm was spotted in the Florida Keys, the first sighting in the Sunshine State since the 1960s. An endangered deer population in Big Pine Key was discovered with the tell-tale symptoms of gaping wounds and erratic, pained behavior. The USDA responded rapidly, deploying hordes of sterilized flies, setting up fly traps in affected areas, and euthanizing deer with advanced infections. In totality, the parasite killed more than 130 Key deer, a population estimated at less than 1,000 before the outbreak. Though the threat was contained by the following year, the incident stoked concerns throughout the country. 

No one really knows why the “Worm Wall” has started to fail. Some believe that human-related activities, such as increasing cattle movements and agricultural expansion, have allowed the flies to breach the barrier that, until recently, has been highly effective at curbing the insect’s range expansion. Max Scott, professor of entomology and genetics at North Carolina State University, researches strains of livestock pests for genetic control programs, with a focus on the screwworm. 

“Why did it break down after being successful for so long? That’s the million-dollar question,” said Scott. 

Bridget Baker, a veterinarian and research assistant professor at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, thinks climate change may have had something to do with the screwworm’s sudden reappearance in the Florida Keys. “There was a major storm just prior to the outbreak. So the question is, ‘Were flies blown up from, like Cuba, for example, into the Florida Keys from that storm?’” said Baker. Though invasive in the U.S., the screwworm is endemic in Cuba, South America, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. 

“And if there’s more major storms, could that potentially lead to more of these upward trajectories of the fly? With climate change, all sorts of species are expected to have range shifts, and so it would be reasonable to assume that the flies could also experience those range shifts. And those range shifts are expected to come higher in latitude.”

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In the past few years, we may have seen just that happen. In 2023, an explosive screwworm outbreak occurred in Panama — the recorded cases in the country shot up from an average of 25 cases annually to more than 6,500. Later that year, an infected cow was found in southern Mexico not far from the border of Guatemala. In response, last November, the USDA halted Mexico’s livestock imports from entering Texas and increased deployments of sterile screwworm males south of the border. Early this year, the suspension was lifted, after both nations agreed to enhanced inspection protocols. 

Then, on May 11, the USDA suspended live cattle, horse, and bison imports from Mexico yet again. The fly had been spotted in remote farms in the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Veracruz, only 700 miles from the southern U.S. border. Experts worry it may just be on the verge of resurging in the U.S. 

If the screwworm does regain its stronghold in the U.S., estimates suggest it will result in  billions in livestock, trade, and ecological losses, and the costs of eradication will be steep. It could also take years to wipe out again, and decades for sectors like the cattle industry to recover. But with President Donald Trump’s USDA overtly refusing to acknowledge climate change or fund climate solutions, and federal cuts resulting in a skeleton agency to tackle the issue, any attempts to halt the range expansion of the fly may ultimately be doomed.

In a press release about the temporary ban, the USDA noted that it would be renewed “on a month-by-month basis, until a significant window of containment is achieved.”

“This is not about politics or punishment of Mexico, rather it is about food and animal safety,” stated Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who previously criticized Mexico for imposing restrictions on a USDA contractor conducting “high-volume precision aerial releases” of sterilized flies in its southern region.

New Mexico Senator Ben Ray Luján, a Democrat and member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, co-sponsored the STOP Screwworms Act, a bill introduced to the Senate on May 14 that would authorize $300 million for USDA to begin construction on a new sterile fly production facility.

“It is vital that Congress act to pass this legislation to protect our farmers and ranchers and prevent an outbreak in the U.S.,” Luján told Grist. When asked about the absence of climate change in the USDA’s messaging about the screwworm, Luján said he’d “long fought to ensure our agricultural communities have the tools they need to confront climate change and its growing impact on farmers and ranchers. Unfortunately, this administration does not share those priorities.” 

The bill has bipartisan support, but another major concern is the USDA’s shrinking capacity to contain the screwworm threat. As part of an effort by the administration to gut spending across most federal agencies, the USDA has cut more than 15,000 staffers since January, leaving behind a skeleton workforce. Several hundred were employees at the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service who were working to prevent invasive pest and disease outbreaks. The budget reconciliation bill currently making its way through Congress includes proposals to further cut USDA spending and gut the agency’s research arms.  

A spokesperson for the USDA declined to comment for this article, and did not respond to Grist’s questions about the role of climate change in escalating the screwworm expansion risk.

Andrew Paul Gutierrez, professor emeritus at University of California, Berkeley, has been investigating the relationship between invasive pests and weather since the 1970s. In 2014, he found that the screwworm moves northward to new regions on anticyclonic winds, or a high-pressure weather system, which scientists believe warming may be affecting — leading to prolonged and more intense heatwaves and shifting wind patterns.

Before it was widely eradicated, the screwworm had been considered somewhat of a seasonal problem in more northern climates where it wasn’t endemic, as it was routinely killed off by freezing temperatures. Though the metallic green-blue fly thrives in tropical temperatures, it doesn’t tend to survive in conditions lower than 45 degrees Fahrenheit, though the movement of livestock and wildlife has shown that colder spells aren’t a silver bullet. As the planet heats up, rising temperatures are creating more favorable conditions for a legion of agricultural pests, like the parasitic fly, to spread and thrive.

Thirty-year average coldest temperatures are rising almost everywhere in the U.S., a new Climate Central analysis found. Future climatic modeling predicts those average temperatures will only continue to climb — further influencing which plants and insects thrive and where across the country.

“With climate change … if it becomes warm enough, and you can get permanent establishment in those areas, then we got a problem,” said Gutierrez. 

By skirting the role of climate change and weather dynamics in escalating the threat, Gutierrez questions whether the USDA’s response and longer-term plan to combat the threat from screwworm flies is destined to fall short. The agency’s response is missing what Gutierrez designates “really critical” insight into how screwworms interact with temperature conditions, and what climate-induced shifts in those means for its survival and reproduction. 

The USDA, said Gutierrez, “spends an awful lot of money” on dealing with the screwworm issue, but he argues that is being hindered by a lack of understanding of the weather-pest-biology relationship, or how weather drives the dynamics of such a species. “And if you don’t know that, then you can’t, say, model the interaction of the invasive species and its natural enemies, or the effects of weather on the invasive species itself,” he said. 

“Without that kind of platform, you’re kind of flying blind.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s climate denial may help a livestock-killing pest make a comeback on May 27, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Ayurella Horn-Muller.

Public consultations for the proposed Shield, which European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced in 2024, closed on May 26.

The Commission has stated that defense of the press will be an “important part” of the initiative, which seeks to address foreign interference online, and counter disinformation and information manipulation, as well as other threats to democratic processes. 

During its 2019 to 2024 term, the European Commission stepped up its defense of media freedom, with actions including: 

• The 2024 European Media Freedom Act to stop media capture by vested interests;
• A 2022 Directive and Recommendation to limit the use of vexatious lawsuits filed to censor critical reporting, known as SLAPPS, or Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation;
• The 2021 Recommendation on journalists’ safety, which guides member states on how to protect journalists.

“Brussels has created the tools for strengthening media freedom in Europe, but journalists need to see that they work,” said CPJ Deputy Advocacy Director, EU, Tom Gibson. “The European Democracy Shield should provide a clear roadmap to push existing reforms forward. EU member states should respond with both financial commitments to ensure its success and renewed political will to save journalism in Europe.”

The impact of recent initiatives has yet to be seen. As CPJ noted in its 2023 report, “Fragile Progress: The struggle for press freedom in the European Union”, improved and sustained action from Brussels is needed to ensure member states deliver on the reforms.

The question of Europe’s political will coincides with a dire financial outlook for the media worldwide, including a shift to digital platforms and declining advertising revenues. The Trump administration’s withdrawal of U.S. financial support has plunged many independent media outlets in Europe into crisis.

Negotiations over the EU’s 2028 to 2034 budget, the Multiannual Financial Framework, are likely to be tense, in part because of diverging outlooks from member states and economic pressures. 

Read CPJ’s full recommendations to the European Commission on the European Democracy Shield here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

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When top Trump adviser Stephen Miller threatened on May 9 that the administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus in response to an “invasion” from undocumented immigrants, he was operating on a fringe legal theory that a right-wing faction has been working to legitimize for more than a decade.

“The Constitution is clear — and that of course is the supreme law of the land — that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion,” Miller said earlier this month in response to a question about Trump’s threat to suspend habeas corpus, the legal right of a prisoner to challenge their detention. Days after Miller’s remarks, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem issued the same warning when a member of a House panel asked her if the number of illegal border crossings meets the threshold for suspending the right. “I’m not a constitutional lawyer,” Noem said. “But I believe it does.”

Hard-liners have referred to immigrants as “invaders” as long as the U.S. has had immigration. By 2022, invasion rhetoric, which had previously been relegated to white nationalist circles, had become such a staple of Republican campaign ads that most of the public agreed an invasion of the U.S. via the southern border was underway.

Now, however, the claim that the U.S. is under invasion has become the legal linchpin of President Donald Trump’s sweeping anti-immigrant campaign.

The claim is Trump’s central justification for invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport roughly 140 Venezuelans to CECOT, the Salvadoran megaprison, without due process. (The administration cited different legal authority for the remaining deportees.) The Trump administration contends they are members of a gang, Tren de Aragua, that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is directing to infiltrate and operate in the United States. Lawyers and families of many of the deportees have presented evidence the prisoners are not even members of Tren de Aragua.

The contention is also the throughline of Trump’s day one executive order “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” That document calls for the expansion of immigration removal proceedings without court hearings and for legal attacks against sanctuary jurisdictions, places that refuse to commit local resources to immigration enforcement.

So far, no court has bought the idea that the U.S. is truly under invasion, as defined by the Constitution or the Alien Enemies Act, on the handful of occasions the government has used the argument to justify supercharged immigration enforcement. Four federal judges, including one Trump appointee, have said the situation Trump describes fails to meet the definition of an invasion. Tren de Aragua “may well be engaged in narcotics trafficking, but that is a criminal matter, not an invasion or predatory incursion,” U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein wrote. Indeed, Trump’s own intelligence agencies found that Maduro is not directing the gang. The Supreme Court has not ruled on the question but froze any more deportations without due process on May 16.

The Trump legal push has been in the works for years. After Trump left the White House, two of his loyalists, former Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli and his now-two-time budget chief Russell Vought, quietly built a consensus for the invasion legal theory among state Republican officials and ultimately helped persuade Texas to give it a test run in court.

Most legal scholars reject the idea that the wave of undocumented immigration fits the original definition of what an invasion is, but they worry nonetheless. When U.S. District Judge Stephanie L. Haines, a Trump appointee, issued a preliminary ruling earlier this month that allowed Trump to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, she did not label immigrants “invaders.” Instead, she proposed that Tren de Aragua was “the modern equivalent of a pirate or a robber.”

If the Supreme Court ultimately takes up the invasion question, a ruling like Haines’ offers a blueprint for sidestepping the issue while giving Trump what he wants, or for embracing the invasion theory wholesale, legal scholars said.

“All this really comes down to the issue of whether the United States Supreme Court is going to allow a president to behave essentially as an autocratic dictator if he’s prepared to make entirely fictitious factual declarations that trigger monarchical power,” said Frank Bowman, a legal historian and professor emeritus at the University of Missouri School of Law.

Under the Constitution, if the United States is invaded, Congress has the power to call up the militia and can allow the suspension of habeas corpus, the constitutional right that is the core of due process. The states, which are normally forbidden from unilaterally engaging in war, can do so according to the Constitution if they are “actually invaded.”

The Alien Enemies Act, an 18th century wartime law enacted during a naval conflict with France, also rests on the definition of an invasion. It allows the president to expel “aliens” during “any invasion or predatory incursion … by any foreign nation or government.” It has only ever been invoked three times, during the War of 1812 and World Wars I and II.

Habeas corpus has likewise been suspended only a handful of times in the Constitution’s nearly 240-year history, including during Reconstruction, to put down violent rebellions in the South by the Ku Klux Klan; in 1905, to suppress the Moro uprising against U.S. control of the Philippines; and in Hawaii after Pearl Harbor in order to place Japanese Americans under martial law. In each of these cases, the executive branch acted after receiving permission from Congress.

An exception was in 1861, when President Abraham Lincoln unilaterally suspended habeas corpus at the outbreak of the Civil War. This provoked a direct confrontation with Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, who ruled that only Congress was empowered to take such an extraordinary step. Congress later papered over the conflict by voting to give Lincoln the authority for the war’s duration.

Today, nearly every historian and constitutional scholar is in agreement that, when it comes to suspending habeas, Congress has the power to decide if the conditions are met.

“The Constitution does not vest this power in the President,” future Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in 2014. “Scholars and courts have overwhelmingly endorsed the position that, Lincoln’s unilateral suspensions of the writ notwithstanding, the Constitution gives Congress the exclusive authority to decide when the predicates specified by the Suspension Clause are satisfied.” Even then, the Constitution only allows Congress to act in extreme circumstances — “when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University who has closely followed these arguments, argues there is virtually no evidence that the drafters of the Constitution thought of an “invasion” as anything other than the kind of organized incursion that would traditionally spark a war.

“The original meaning of ‘invasion’ in the Constitution is actually what sort of the average normal person would think it means,” Somin said. “As James Madison put it, invasion is an operation of war. What Vladimir Putin did to Ukraine, that’s an invasion. What Hamas did to Israel, that’s an invasion. On the other hand, illegal migration, or drug smuggling, or ordinary crime — that’s not an invasion.”

In 1994, Florida Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles Jr. filed the first modern-day lawsuit arguing otherwise. The Haitian and Cuban refugee crises had spawned a new wave of anti-immigration sentiment, and hard-liners accused the federal government of owing states billions for handling immigrants’ supposed crimes and welfare claims. Chiles, who died in 1998, took the concept one step further. He filed a $1.5 billion suit claiming the U.S. had violated the section of the Constitution stating the federal government “shall protect each [state] against Invasion.”

Federal courts slapped down his lawsuit — and a spate of copycat suits from Arizona, California, New York and New Jersey — and the legal case for calling immigration an invasion died out.

In the late 2000s, a group of far-right voices began to revive this approach. Ken Cuccinelli was among the first and most strident. He was an early member of State Legislators for Legal Immigration, part of a powerful network of anti-immigration groups that pioneered efforts like ending birthright citizenship. The organization contended that immigrants were “foreign invaders” as described in the Constitution.

Cuccinelli evangelized for the theory as he rose from a state legislator to an official in Trump’s first Department of Homeland Security.

“Under war powers, there’s no due process,” Cuccinelli told Breitbart radio shortly before his appointment in the first Trump administration. “They can literally just line their National Guard up with, presumably with riot gear like they would if they had a civil disturbance, and turn people back at the border. … You just point them back across the river and let them swim for it.”

Cuccinelli got traction after Trump’s reelection loss. He joined a think tank Vought had founded as its immigration point man. During his time in the first Trump administration, Vought became frustrated that the president’s goals were frequently thwarted. He founded the Center for Renewing America, dedicated to a sweeping vision of remaking the government and society — what ultimately became Project 2025.

In remarks to a private audience at his think tank in 2023, Vought, who is now Trump’s budget chief and the intellectual force behind Trump’s unprecedented executive power grab, said he specifically championed the term “invasion” because it “unlocked” extraordinary presidential powers.

“One of the reasons why we were very, so insistent about coming up with the whole notion of the border being an ‘invasion’ because there were Constitutional authorities that were a part of being able to call it an invasion,” Vought said. Documented and ProPublica obtained videos of Vought’s speech last year. Vought and Cuccinelli did not respond to requests for comment.

In 2021 and 2022, Cucinelli, with Vought’s help, mounted press conferences and privately urged Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas to proclaim that their states were being invaded.

After Arizona’s then-attorney general, Mark Brnovich, released a legal opinion in February 2022 proclaiming violent cartels had “actually invaded” and opened the door for Ducey to deploy the state’s National Guard, Vought bragged to his audience that he and Cuccinelli had personally provided draft language for the opinion. In a previous email to ProPublica, Brnovich acknowledged speaking to Cuccinelli but said his opinion was “drafted and written by hard working attorneys (including myself) in our office.”

Ducey never acted on the invasion theory. But Abbott was more receptive. He invoked the state’s war powers, citing the “actually invaded” clause, in a 2022 open letter to President Joe Biden. “Two years of inaction on your part now leave Texas with no choice,” he wrote. Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesperson for Abbott, said the governor “declared an invasion due to the Biden Administration’s repeated failures in upholding its constitutional duty to secure the border and defend states.”

Abbott ordered the banks of the Rio Grande river to be strung with razor wire and a shallow section to be obstructed by a 1,000-foot string of man-sized buoys and blades and signed a law, S.B. 4, giving state authorities the power to deport undocumented immigrants.

When the Justice Department sued, Abbott’s administration argued in legal briefs that its actions were justified in part because his state was under “invasion.” Twenty-three Republican attorneys general filed a brief in agreement.

“In both scope and effect, the wave of illegal migrants pouring across the border is like an invasion,” their brief read. “The Constitution’s text, the principle of sovereignty in the federal design, and the broader constitutional structure all support the conclusion that the States have a robust right to engage in self-defense. Contained within that right is presumptively acts to repel invasion.”

Texas’ invasion argument did not prevail. The 5th Circuit has blocked S.B. 4., and a lower court and a three-judge panel skewered Abbott’s constitutional argument in the buoy case. In 2024, the full 5th Circuit ruled under another law that Abbott was entitled to leave the floating barriers in place. It avoided ruling on Texas’ invasion claim altogether — but not without one judge dissenting. Trump appointee James Ho argued courts have no ability to second-guess executives about which threats rise to the level of an invasion and justify military action.

In his speech, Vought credited “the massive take-up rate” of the invasion legal theory to his and Cuccinelli’s behind-the-scenes efforts. Now the concept is being taken seriously by the president’s top advisers as they threaten to upend a core civil liberty.

“The definition of ‘invasion’ has broad implications for civil liberties — that’s pretty obvious,” Somin said. “They’re trying to use this as a tool to get around constitutional and other legal constraints on deportation and exclusion that would otherwise exist. But they also want to use it to undermine civil liberties” for U.S. citizens.

Molly Redden is covering legal affairs and how the second Trump administration is attempting to reshape the legal system. You can send her tips at molly.redden@propublica.org or via Signal at mollyredden.14.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Molly Redden.

Last May, Vermont became the first state to pass a climate Superfund law. The concept is modeled after the 1980 federal Superfund law, which holds companies responsible for the costs of cleaning up their hazardous waste spills. The state-level climate version requires major oil and gas companies to pay for climate-related disaster and adaptation costs, based on their share of global greenhouse gas emissions over the past few decades. Vermont’s law passed after the state experienced torrential flooding in 2023. In December, New York became the second state to pass such a law. 

This year, 11 states, from California to Maine, have introduced their own climate Superfund bills. Momentum is growing even as Vermont and New York’s laws face legal challenges by fossil fuel companies, Republican-led states, and the Trump administration. Lawmakers and climate advocates told Grist that they always expected backlash, given the billions of dollars at stake for the oil and gas industry — but that states have no choice but to find ways to pay the enormous costs of protecting and repairing infrastructure in the face of increasing floods, wildfires, and other disasters.

The opposition “emboldens our fight more,” said Maryland state delegate Adrian Boafo, who represents Prince George’s County and co-sponsored a climate Superfund bill that passed the state legislature in March. “It means that we have to do everything we can in Maryland to protect our citizens, because we can’t rely on the federal government in this moment.” 

While the concept of a climate Superfund has been around for decades, it’s only in recent years that states have begun to seriously consider these laws. In Maryland, federal inaction on climate change and the growing burden of climate change on government budgets have led to a surge of interest, said Boafo. Cities and counties are getting hit with huge unexpected costs from damage to stormwater systems, streets, highways, and other public infrastructure. They’re also struggling to provide immediate disaster relief to residents and to prepare for future climate events. Maryland has faced at least $10 billion to $20 billion in disaster costs between 1980 and 2024, according to a recent state report. Meanwhile, up until now, governments, businesses, and individuals have borne 100 percent of these costs. 

“We realized that these big fossil fuel companies were, frankly, not paying their fair share for the climate crisis that they’ve caused,” Boafo said. 

Recent bills have also been spurred by increased sophistication in attribution science, said Martin Lockman, a climate law fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. Researchers are now able to use climate models to link extreme weather events to greenhouse gas emissions from specific companies. The field provides a quantitative way for governments to determine which oil and gas companies should pay for climate damages, and how much. 

Vermont’s law sets up a process for the government to first tally up the costs of climate harms in the state caused by the greenhouse gas emissions of major oil and gas companies between 1995 and 2024. The state will then determine how much of those costs each company is responsible for, invoice them accordingly, and devote the funds to climate infrastructure and resilience projects. New York’s law, by contrast, sets a funding target ahead of time by requiring certain fossil fuel companies to pay a total of $75 billion, or $3 billion per year over 25 years. The amount each company has to pay is proportionate to their share of global greenhouse gas emissions between 2000 and 2024. Both Vermont and New York’s laws apply only to companies that have emitted over 1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions over their respective covered periods. That would include Exxon Mobil, Shell, and other oil and gas giants.

Maryland’s law is so far the only climate Superfund-related legislation to pass this year, although it hasn’t yet been signed by the state’s governor. The original draft of the bill would have required major fossil fuel companies to pay a one-time fee for their historic carbon emissions. But over the course of the legislative session, the bill was amended to instead simply require a study on the cumulative costs of climate change in Maryland, to understand how much money an eventual program would need to raise. The study would be due by December 2026, at which point Maryland lawmakers would need to propose new legislation to actually implement a climate Superfund program.

“I wish it wasn’t amended the way it was,” Boafo said, adding that lawmakers devoted much of their energy this legislative session to addressing Maryland’s $3.3 billion budget deficit. “At the same time, passing this new, amended version of the bill acknowledges to the state and to our constituents that we want to research how much actually would come to the state, how this program would be operated, what this would actually look like,” he said. “It’s not the step that a lot of us wanted, but it is a step forward.” 

In California, environmental groups are optimistic about the chances of a bill passing this year. This is the second year a climate Superfund bill has been introduced in the state, and the sponsors of the new bill have focused on building a broad coalition of environmental, community, and labor groups around the proposal, said Sabrina Ashjian, project director for the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the UCLA School of Law. This year’s legislation was introduced shortly after the devastating Los Angeles wildfires in January, which could amplify lawmakers’ sense of urgency. The bill has now passed out of each legislative chamber’s environmental committee and is awaiting votes in their respective judiciary committees. If passed, the bill will next move to the full Senate and Assembly for a final vote. 

In the meantime, legislators are keeping a close eye on ongoing legal challenges to Vermont’s and New York’s laws. In January, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute, two trade groups, launched a lawsuit against Vermont’s climate Superfund law. In February, 22 Republican state attorneys general and industry groups filed a lawsuit against New York’s law. Both challenges claim that the laws violate interstate commerce protections and are preempted by federal law. Because the federal Clean Air Act regulates greenhouse gas emissions, the groups argue, states cannot pass laws related to climate damages. 

Now the Trump administration has joined the legal battle. On May 1, the Department of Justice sued the states of New York and Vermont over their climate Superfund programs, echoing the same arguments raised by the fossil fuel industry. The same day, the department also sued the states of Hawaiʻi and Michigan over their intentions to sue fossil fuel companies for climate-related damages. All four lawsuits frequently use identical language, Lockman pointed out. The lawsuits follow last month’s executive order by President Donald Trump that called for the Justice Department to challenge state climate policies, and directly targeted Vermont and New York’s climate Superfund laws. Shortly after the Justice Department’s lawsuits were filed, West Virginia and 23 other states announced they would join the existing lawsuit against Vermont’s law led by the Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute. 

Legal experts noted that Trump’s executive order itself has no legal impact, and that states have well-established authority to implement environmental policies. Patrick Parenteau, a legal scholar at Vermont Law and Graduate School, told the New York Times he expected the Justice Department’s cases to be dismissed. A court could end up consolidating the federal suits with existing challenges against Vermont and New York’s laws, although given that they raise the same arguments, “there’s really nothing new being added here,” said Lockman. 

Climate experts told Grist that with huge amounts of money and liability at stake, lawsuits from the fossil fuel industry weren’t unexpected. Boafo said that given how much financial and political support the Trump campaign received from oil and gas corporations, it’s not a surprise that the Justice Department has sued New York and Vermont. Pursuing these laws invites inevitable opposition — but avoiding the growing costs of climate devastation is even riskier, advocates said. 

Lawmakers are “passing these bills because in writing budgets, in dealing with the day-to-day operation of their states, they’re facing really serious questions about how our society is going to allocate the harms of climate change,” said Lockman. “I suspect that the lawmakers who are advocating for these bills are in it for the long haul.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Despite backlash, more states are considering laws to make Big Oil pay for climate change on May 19, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Akielly Hu.

Then what about a sustainable city? Unfortunately, when planners and politicians talk about making cities more sustainable, they are thinking of large urban centers like Portland or Seattle. Oh, the buzz phrases: walkable neighborhoods, traditional architecture, and diverse land uses. It’s neighborhoods that sort of look like small towns. The fix is in for those large cities as planners and developers are B.S.-ing introducing a “small-town feel” into large cities and suburbs. This will never ever create a sense of community, nor will it reduce the use of automobiles.

From the promo stuff on the book, The New American Small Town: “So, what of small towns themselves? We don’t talk about these places as much. They are often assumed to be utopias of the past or crumbling ghost towns of the present day rather than places with potential for sustainable living. This book critically examines narratives of American small towns, contrasting them with lived experiences in these places, and considers both the myth and reality in the context of current urban challenges. Interweaving stories from and about U.S. small towns, the book offers lessons in sustainable urbanism that can be applied both in the towns themselves and to the larger cities and suburbs where most Americans now live.”

Like I stated above, there are dozens of books for planning students and developers and chambers of commerce and policy wonks on how to jigger things for smalltowns.

“The book offers hope-filled portraits of small towns as livable, sustainable, and diverse places and serves as an important corrective to the media narrative of alienated, left-behind rural voters.”

—Mark Bjelland, author of Good Places for All

Thinking of community from that large urban space, Jane Jacobs approached cities as living beings and ecosystems. She suggested that over time, buildings, streets and neighborhoods function as dynamic organisms, changing in response to how people interact with them. She explained how each element of a city – sidewalks, parks, neighborhoods, government, economy – functions together synergistically, in the same manner as the natural ecosystem. This understanding helps us discern how cities work, how they break down, and how they could be better structured.

She was looking at big urban places, like her home, New York:

“Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental.” (source)

In my small town, population 2,300, we look toward the sea and the forest as reminders of how vital ecosystems are. The county becomes a network of towns along the coast and inland — Lincoln City, Depoe Bay, Newport, Seal Rock, Waldport, Yahcats.

We drive a lot, and the traffic during tourist summer season balloons. The town of Lincoln City is around 10,000, but on some weekends, it swells to 50,000. All that infrastructure, all that water, all those restaurants and beaches, well, think of five times the impact, or more, since locals do not all swarm to the beaches or the restaurants all in one fell swoop.

We are living on unceded land, and in many cases, sacred burial land: Indigenous Communities in Oregon.

The links below are the websites of Oregon’s nine federally recognized tribal communities:

• Burns Paiute Tribe
• Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians
• Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon
• Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians
• Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation
• Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs
• Coquille Indian Tribe
• Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians
• Klamath Tribes

The story of a community is all wrapped up in its context, history, and in this age of a memory hole crazy presidency —  with white supremacists like Jewish Stephen Miller running the Trump team’s Gestapo and Big Brother training camp —  we will see history literally erased.

Communities that are small are more vulnerable than those large urban areas Jacobs wrote about, and studied.

From my urban and regional-planning graduate-student days (looking at concepts of small is better and scaling down) there are so many quotable axioms tied to communities that are considered small. Here are some notes from one of my planning classes looking at regional smalltown planning:

01/21/2015: Institutions of higher education exist for the common good, and the unfettered search for truth and its free exploration is critical to the common good. The college seeks to educate its students in the democratic tradition, to foster recognition of individual freedoms and social responsibility, and to inspire meaningful awareness of and respect for a collaborative learning environment. Freedom of expression will be guaranteed to instructors to create a classroom atmosphere that allows students to raise questions and consider all sides of issues. OCCC instructors are responsible for exercising judgment in selecting topics of educational value for discussion and learning consistent with course requirements, goals, and desired outcomes.   (Emphasis added, DP)

Not sure how my email exploring higher education’s fear of losing all of the humanities, losing all the Diversity Equity Inclusion courses, and gutting liberal arts in general, how all of that is “not allowing” students to raise questions and consider all sides of issues.

Small towns or big towns, pick your institution and Kafkaesque poison.

But part of my role in community consciousness raising is primarily community journalism, also known as solutions journalism, so in this most recent iteration of Haeder, I have a fairly new show, one hour a week, dealing with public affairs, but truly an interview show, a deep dive with a guest or guests, and alas, all shows, all topics, all of it derives from my own deep well of experience, exploration, education and emancipation — the Four E’s, man, of life!

Some upcoming shows, Wednesday, on the air, 6 to 7 PM, Finding Fringe: Voice from the Edge, KYAQ.org (streaming live) and 91.7 FM, Lincoln County.

I’m shifting some of the program dates around since we have current news around the mayor of a small town, Waldport, being arrested and removed from her position as elected mayor. That’s May 14.

You have to listen to her. May 14. 6 pm. again, stream the show, kyaq.org

• Then, have you ever heard of the Amanda Trail in Yachats?
• Do you know what it is like to be incarcerated and then put on 6 years house arrest? Part I & II.
• Rick Bartow, the famous artist, will be a living reflection at the Yakona Nature Preserve.
• The Rights of Nature and the Community Bill of Rights? Kai of CELDF will tell us all about that.
• Siletz is the Home of the Elakha Alliance, a non-profit to work with stakeholders of every sort to reintroduce sea otters to Oregon’s coast.
• So you leave prison and you have a farm to work on to heal, to reorient oneself, to let the soil salve the PTSD. Freedom Farms.

May 14 — Heide Lambert, Waldport Mayor controversy

May 21 — Amanda Trail,  Joanne Kittel

May 28 — Prisons, Incarceration, Probation — Kelly Kloss

June 4 — Prisons, Incarceration, Alcoholism — Kelly Kloss

June 11 — Three women from Yakona Nature Preserve & Learning Center — Anna, Rena, JoAnn

June 18 — CELDF, Rights of Nature & Community Rights — Kai  Huschke

June 25 — Chanel Hason, Elakha Alliance, sea otters

July 2–  Freedom Farms — Sean O Ceallaigh

Past shows are on the website, but only in limited form. Go to archives, and then put in Finding Fringe.

Try listening to a smalltown radio station, tuning into a smalltown resident’s take on what it TAKES to be a citizen of the world in a small town, this one called Waldport.

Here, yet another global thing attached to Waldport — a former Georgia slave paid for his freedom and ended up out here!  You Can’t Have Your Mule and Forty Acres, Too!

How about the legacy of genocide out here? Not Just One of those Tales of Another Dead Indian

You’ll get the picture that Waldport or Vancouver, BC, or El Paso or Mexico City, we all face the same problems that the rich and the militarists and the oligarchs force us to fight.

Tune in, KYAQ.org, streaming worldwide, Wednesdays, 6 PM, PST.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

The proposed HHS budget would effectively shutter SAMHSA, radically slash NIH support for biomedical research, cut certain preschool and community services programs and dilute critical research into women and marginalized community’s health among other major changes.

Public Citizen Co-President Lisa Gilbert issued the following statement:

“It’s impossible to understand Secretary Kennedy’s mental gymnastics in simultaneously telling Americans he will improve their health while supporting a proposed White House budget that guts crucial existing health services but funnels $500 million into his vague, imaginary “MAHA” initiative.

“While Kennedy tries to distract the American people with slogans and pseudoscience, hospitals are scrambling to stay afloat and millions of Medicaid patients are bracing for the potential loss of their healthcare coverage in service of tax cuts for the wealthy if the MAGA reconciliation package moves.

“Meanwhile, Kennedy remains avoidant in taking accountability for his ongoing responsibilities and defends the firing of 10,000 HHS workers and dismantling of NIOSH and the NIH. His time in his position as HHS secretary indicates he is not prioritizing Americans’ health. Instead, he’s pushing through his bizarre personal agenda with reckless abandon.

“Kennedy said ‘I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me.’ Congress should take those words to heart and reject the 2026 White House budget that further guts public health programs and could sicken millions of Americans.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

One of Elon Musk’s employees is earning between $100,001 and $1 million annually as a political adviser to his billionaire boss while simultaneously helping to dismantle the federal agency that regulates two of Musk’s biggest companies, according to court records and a financial disclosure report obtained by ProPublica.

Ethics experts said Christopher Young’s dual role — working for a Musk company as well as the Department of Government Efficiency — likely violates federal conflict-of-interest regulations. Musk has publicly called for the elimination of the agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, arguing that it is “duplicative.’’

Government ethics rules bar employees from doing anything that “would cause a reasonable person to question their impartiality” and are designed to prevent even the appearance of using public office for private gain.

Court records show Young, who works for a Musk company called Europa 100 LLC, was involved in the Trump administration’s efforts to unwind the consumer agency’s operations and fire most of its staff in early February.

Young’s arrangement raises questions of where his loyalty lies, experts said. The dynamic is especially concerning, they said, given that the CFPB — which regulates companies that provide financial services — has jurisdiction over Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, which makes auto loans, and his social media site, X, which announced in January that it was partnering with Visa on mobile payments.

The world’s richest man has in turn made no secret of his desire to do away with the bureau, posting just weeks after Donald Trump’s election victory, “Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies.”

“Musk clearly has a conflict of interest and should recuse,” said Claire Finkelstein, who directs the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. “And therefore an employee of his, who is answerable to him on the personal side, outside of government, and who stands to keep his job only if he supports Musk’s personal interests, should not be working for DOGE.”

Young, a 36-year-old Republican consultant, has been active in political circles for years, most recently serving as the campaign treasurer of Musk’s political action committee, helping the tech titan spend more than a quarter billion dollars to help elect Trump.

Before joining Musk’s payroll, he worked as a vice president for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the trade association representing the pharmaceutical industry’s interests, his disclosure shows. He also worked as a field organizer for the Republican National Committee and for former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, the New York Times reported.

Young was appointed a special governmental employee in the U.S. Office of Personnel Management on Jan. 30 and dispatched to work in the CFPB in early February, according to court records and his disclosure form. Someone with his position could be making as much as $190,000 a year in government salary, documents obtained by Bloomberg show. At the same time, Young collects a salary as an employee of Musk’s Texas-based Europa 100 LLC, where, according to his disclosure report, his duties are to “advise political and public policy.”

Beyond that description, it’s not clear what, exactly, Young does at Europa 100 or what the company’s activities are.

It was created in July 2020 by Jared Birchall, a former banker who runs Musk’s family office, Excession LLC, according to state records. The company has been used to pay nannies to at least some of Musk’s children, according to a 2023 tabloid report, and, along with two other Musk entities, to facilitate tens of millions of dollars in campaign transactions, campaign finance reports show.

As a special government employee, Young can maintain outside employment while serving for a limited amount of time. But such government workers are still required to abide by laws and rules governing conflicts of interest and personal and business relationships.

Cynthia Brown, the senior ethics counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has sued the administration to produce a range of public records documenting DOGE’s activities, said that Young’s government work appears to benefit his private sector employer.

“Which hat are you wearing while you’re serving the American people? Are you doing it for the interests of your outside job?” she asked.

In addition to his role at Europa 100, Young reported other ties to Musk’s private businesses. He affirmed in his disclosure form that he will “continue to participate” in a “defined contribution plan” sponsored by Excession, the Musk home office, and that he has served since February as a “vice president” of United States of America Inc., another Musk entity organized by Birchall, where he also advises on “political and public policy,” the records show. While he lists the latter among “sources of compensation exceeding $5,000 in a year,” the exact figure is not disclosed.

Young did not return a call and emails seeking comment. The CFPB, DOGE and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Musk didn’t respond to an email seeking comment, and Birchall didn’t return a call left at a number he lists in public formation records. A lawyer who helped form United States of America Inc. hung up when reached for comment and hasn’t responded to a subsequent message. Asked about how his business interests and government work may intersect, Musk said in a February interview that, “I’ll recuse myself if it is a conflict.”

The revelation of Young’s apparent violation of federal standards of conduct follows a series of ProPublica stories documenting how another DOGE aide helped carry out the administration’s attempts to implement mass layoffs at the CFPB while holding as much as $715,000 in stock that bureau employees are prohibited from owning — actions one expert called a “pretty clear-cut violation” of the federal criminal conflict-of-interest statute. The White House has defended the aide, saying he “did not even manage” the layoffs, “making this entire narrative an outright lie.” A spokesperson also said the aide had until May 8 to divest, though it isn’t clear whether he did and the White House hasn’t answered questions about that. “These allegations are another attempt to diminish DOGE’s critical mission,” the White House said. Following ProPublica’s reporting, the aide’s work at the CFPB ended.

On Monday, a group of 10 good government and consumer advocacy groups, citing ProPublica’s coverage, sent a letter to the acting inspector general of the CFPB, asking him to “swiftly investigate these clear conflicts of interest violations of Trump Administration officials acting in their own personal financial interest.”

ProPublica has identified nearly 90 officials assigned to DOGE, though it’s unclear how many, if any, have potential conflicts. Government agencies have been slow to release financial disclosure forms. But Finkelstein said the cases reported by ProPublica call into question the motivation behind DOGE’s efforts to undo the consumer watchdog agency.

“It matters because it means that the officials who work for the government, who are supposed to be dedicated to the interests of the American people, are not necessarily focused on the good of the country but instead may be focused on the good of themselves, self enrichment, or trying to please their boss by focusing on enriching their bosses and growing their portfolios,” she said.

Unionized CFPB workers have sued the CFPB’s acting director, Russell Vought, to stop his attempts to drastically scale down the bureau’s staff and its operations. Since taking office, the Trump administration has twice attempted to fire nearly all of the agency’s employees, tried canceling nearly all of its contracts and instituted stop-work mandates that have stifled virtually all agency work, including investigations into companies, ProPublica previously reported.

The parties will appear before an appeals court this Friday for oral arguments in a case that will determine just how deeply Vought can cut the agency while still ensuring that it carries out dozens of mandates Congress tasked it with when lawmakers established the bureau in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

The court records produced in the litigation offer a window into the role Young played in gutting the CFPB during the administration’s first attempt to unwind the bureau beginning in early February.

He was dispatched to the CFPB’s headquarters on Feb. 6, just two days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, then the agency’s acting director, told the staff and contractors to stop working. The following day, Young and other DOGE aides were given access to nonclassified CFPB systems, court records show. That same day, Musk posted “CFPB RIP” with a gravestone emoji.

On Feb. 11 and 12, Young was included on emails with top agency officials. One of those messages discussed the cancellation of more than 100 contracts, an act that a contracting officer described in a sworn affidavit as including “all contracts related to enforcement, supervision, external affairs, and consumer response.” Another message involved how to transfer to the Treasury Department some of the more than $3 billion in civil penalties that the bureau has collected from companies to settle consumer protection cases, a move that could deny harmed consumers compensation. A third discussed the terms of an agreement that would allow for the mass layoff of staffers, court records show.

In his financial disclosure form, which he signed on Feb. 15, Young listed his employment by Musk’s Europa 100 as active, beginning in August 2024 through the “present.”

Then, in early March, as the legal fight over the administration’s cuts played out before a federal judge, Young sent the CFPB’s chief operating officer a message about forthcoming firings, known as a “reduction in force,” or RIF, in government parlance. In the email, he asked whether officials were “prepared to implement the RIF” if the judge lifted a temporary stay, according to a March district court opinion that has for the moment stopped most of the administration’s proposed cuts.

In addition to his employment, Young’s disclosure presents another potential conflict.

He also lists owning as much as $15,000 in Amazon stock, a company that is on the bureau’s “Prohibited Holdings” list. Agency employees are forbidden from having such investments, and ethics experts have said that participating in an agency action that could boost the stock’s value — such as stripping the CFPB of its staff — constitutes a violation of the criminal conflict-of-interest statute.

Young hasn’t responded to questions about that either.

Al Shaw contributed reporting and Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jake Pearson.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has openly vowed to pour $100 million into campaigns to defeat progressive representatives like Cori Bush who have spoken out against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. As Chris McGreal writes in The Guardian, “after it played a leading role in unseating New York congressman Jamaal Bowman, another progressive Democrat who criticised the scale of Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza… AIPAC pumped $8.5m into the race in Missouri’s first congressional district to support [Wesley] Bell through its campaign funding arm, the United Democracy Project (UDP), after Bush angered some pro-Israel groups as one of the first members of Congress to call for a ceasefire after the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel.” After Bush was unseated in August, she vowed to keep fighting for justice, and she put AIPAC on notice: “AIPAC,” she told supporters, “I’m coming to tear your kingdom down.”

At the 2025 National Membership Meeting of Jewish Voice for Peace in Baltimore, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez sits down with the former Congresswoman and key member of “The Squad” to discuss her re-election loss, the undue influence of organizations like AIPAC on our democracy, and Bush’s plan for fighting back.

Studio Production: Kayla Rivara, Rosette Sewali
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

We’re here at the Jewish Voice for Peace National Membership Meeting held in downtown Baltimore, and I am honored to be sitting here with Congresswoman Cori Bush, who just gave an incredible speech at the closing plenary.

Congresswoman, thank you so much for joining me. I know we only have a limited time here, and I wanted to just sort of ask, first and foremost, for our viewers out there who saw your re-election campaign be awarded by $8.5 million from AIPAC, amidst other things, what would you say to folks out there who just see the results of that election and think, oh, well, she lost fair in square. What’s really going on underneath that?

Cori Bush:

Well, thank you for the question. First of all, there was no fair. There was no square. There was deceit, manipulation, lies, misinformation, racism, bigotry, hatred, vitriol, and it was all okay. There was nothing that was off limits as long as AIPAC got the result that they wanted. They didn’t care about how it ripped apart our community, how all of the years of organizing, so much of it was just disrupted and some of those bonds that people created, it just completely shattered. They didn’t care about that. They don’t care about that. They don’t care that I’m the same person that some of those folks marched with out on the streets of Ferguson during the uprising in 2014 and 2015.

They don’t care that I am the one who protested the ending of the eviction moratorium in 2021 as a freshman out on the steps of the US Capitol to make sure that 11 million people weren’t about to be evicted from their homes when the government could have done something about it. They didn’t care about that. They wanted to discredit me because in discrediting someone that the people trust, then it pulls power not only from that person that they trust, but it pulls power from the people. So there over $8 million that they put in, plus those that they were working with, it roughly ended up being around $15 million, between 15 to $20 million, which is the numbers that we’ve seen. And I just want to make this point. To use racism against me, to distort my face on mailers to make me look like an animal, to use lies about my family or me. The thing is this, if you’re doing the right thing and you’re doing it for the right reason, why can’t you just use truth?

I have no problem with people running against each other. We’re able to do that. That’s how I won my race. I ran against someone I thought was ineffective. I felt like I could do more. I spoke about what I would do and how I felt I could do it. I spoke about my past and who I wanted to be as a member of Congress. The people believed it because the people saw me as that person, and I won around $1.4 million. It took me that much money to unseat a 20-year incumbent whose parent, whose father was in the seat for 32 years. So 52 years worth of a machine. I spent around $1.4 million to unseat. I won that race with over 4,700 votes. AIPAC and the groups that they were working with, they spent around 15 million. The person only won by less than 7,000 votes.

So it took basically 15 million … I mean, 15 times the amount of money to unseat me that it took me to unseat someone who had a 52-year family legacy. So that was the depth of the deceit that they had to use. And I’ll say this, never once did they say anything about Israel or Palestine. Never once did they use that in ads. Now in front of people, they would call me anti-Semitic. People would say, well, what did she do? Oh, well, [inaudible 00:04:41]. I have anything to show you. But what they would use in the ads was, oh, she’s mean to Joe Biden. She wants kids to drink contaminated water from lead pipes. Those were the things that they used against me. And because it flooded the media, our local media so heavily because of the amount of money, because you will see four or five ads from my opponent and then only one ad from me, the people started to believe and they were wondering, well, why does he have so much money? Well, why does it?

So that’s what it looked like, and that’s how they were able to deceive the community to make them think, oh, well, then maybe something is going on that we don’t understand. And then they also made people feel like, well, I’m confused, so maybe I’ll just stay home.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I want to ask another follow-up question on that because of course, you and other members of the squad are representative of a grassroots hope coming from a lot of the folks that we talk to and interview on a weekly basis. This is a hope over the past 10 years that there was still a possibility of making progressive change through electoral politics.

What would you say to folks right now who are feeling despondent and after seeing AIPAC still amidst all of that unseat, you unseat Jamal Bowman, the richest man in the world buying his way into our government right now? what would you say to folks who feel like we don’t have enough to take on their money?

Cori Bush:

Well, that’s what they want us to believe. They want us to fall into this place of just feeling overwhelmed, just believing the chaos. They want us to stop fighting. They want us to think that … Well, they want us to just live in this place of fatigue. That’s why they keep ramming this train our way. But we can’t allow that to happen because what they understand is it’s actually the people who have the power. That’s why they have to do so much and push so hard and spend so much money because they understand is that it’s really us who has the power. We just have to acknowledge it and understand it and figure out how to properly use our power to fight against this. And so yes, I was unseated Jamal Bowman was unseated, and I know that we know that they’re coming from more in 2026 and beyond.

But the thing is, the movement is never one person or never a few people. Yes, we were working for more progressive change, and that’s an issue right now. But the other part of that is we need our actual elected officials who claim to be progressive, to actually be that. We need them or stop saying that you are, because then you’re making people feel this way because they’re looking like, oh, these are our people, but what’s going on? Why aren’t they pushing? Why aren’t they fighting for this change? So we need people to be your authentic self in this moment because the people are falling away from the Democratic Party because they feel the hypocrisy. People are saying, I don’t understand why you’re not fighting hard enough. You said this man is a fascist. He’s a racist, he’s a white supremacist. He’s authoritarian, he’s a dictator. He’s all of these things. But you’re not meeting the moment. You’re not meeting the threat with the proper opposition to it.

But when they also see that some of these same folks who are supposed to be our “leaders” take money from groups like AIPAC who are primarily funded by Republicans who also endorse insurrectionist members of Congress or people who supported insurrectionists, at least we feel, then the people are like, well, why should I believe and trust in you? Also, if you are cool with allowing a genocide to happen on our watch in our lifetime with our tax dollars, if you are okay with that, then what is your red line? Because apparently, death and destruction of thousands of people, it’s not. So who are you? Is this the party of human rights and civil rights? Is this the party of equality and equity and peace? Is this that party? It is absolutely not if there is no no real opposition to what we’re seeing right now.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And just a final question. When you lost your reelection and you gave this rousing kind of speech that you sort of brought back into your speech today, you told AIPAC, “I’m coming to tear down your kingdom.” I wanted to ask, just in closing here with the last minute, I’ve got you. What does that mean? What does that look like? And for folks out there watching who want to see that, who want this undue money and influence out of our politics, what is it going to take to tear down that kingdom?

Cori Bush:

So one thing I won’t do is give all the secrets away. So I can’t give all of the … but what I will say is part of it is this, part of it is being here with the people. So Jewish Voice for Peace has 100% been a supporter of mine. And this didn’t just start after October 7th. We’ve been working with folks with JVP for years. This is not anything new, and we’ll continue to do that work. But the fact that they continue to organize … other groups are organizing and calling out the name “AIPAC.” There are experts working on why there is this loophole that allows for AIPAC to do some of the lobbying they do. There is a lot happening behind the scenes, and I’m going to continue to do that work. But the stuff that is more forward-facing, I’m going to continue to organize.

I’m going to continue to make sure that people know. The PAC United Democracy Project is … We need people to understand the connection between them and AIPAC. So that’s where the money is going to flow from. It’s going to flow from UDP. We need people to know DMFI and know some of these other names, but we also need people to know that in your local community, there are PACs being formed that are basically a smaller AIPAC. And their whole purpose is to try to make people to be kind of ambiguous. And so you won’t know that this is who they are. It is just like, oh, it’s this group that has all of this money that’s coming against this elected official that’s speaking out against the genocide. But they have all of this money, and so it’s like maybe they’re good. We want people to know. So educating people around the country as well.

I’m not going to stop fighting because AIPAC came for me. The thing is this: AIPAC didn’t make me, so AIPAC can’t break me. AIPAC didn’t position me so they can deposition me. The thing is, I got there because the people put me there, but I was there for a purpose and a mission. So that’s the other part. So I knew while I was there in Congress that I was on a timer. I knew that I was only there for a purpose, for a mission. I knew that there was this urgency on the inside of me. One thing that I would say to people all the time is I felt this weeping. I just only inside of me, I just always felt like crying. It never stopped 24 hours a day. And it’s the thing that kept me moving fast. Like, okay, I got to do this. I got to do that.

People in Congress will say, “She’s championed all of these different areas. Why is she doing so much?” That was why I didn’t know that I would only be there four years, but I needed to get the work done, and I needed to be true to what I said, who I said I would be. But also, I needed to be what I needed. That’s what I had to be what I needed when I was unhoused, when I was hungry, when I was abused, and all of the things. I needed that. I needed what my grandmother needed when she taught me that you never look a white woman in her face because of what she went through the experience in Mississippi growing up and my ancestors before her through chattel slavery. I needed to be what they needed. And I’ll never stop doing that because the thing is, it’s not about me, it’s what is who God created me to be. And that’s just everything for me. And so I’m not afraid.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

Trump’s budget request puts a sledgehammer to the programs that millions of Americans rely on. It would cut nondefense discretionary spending by $174 billion, leaving it at the lowest level as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) on record. The proposed cuts are extreme by any standard, but they’re extreme even by Trump’s own standards. For comparison, in his skinny budget in 2017, Trump called to cut this category of funding by $54 billion. The cuts in this budget are especially egregious when you consider that Trump is also trying to push the largest Medicaid and food assistance cuts in American history through Congress over the next few months.

If it goes into effect, Trump’s budget proposal would make it much harder for Americans to cover basic needs such as child care and education—harming American households and leaving vulnerable families even worse off. Specifically, his budget request calls for enormous cuts to K-12 education and rental assistance as well as for the elimination of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps poor households heat their homes in the winter. Americans are not going to be better off by any means. Trump’s budget proposal will come at the expense of the American people.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Prime Minister Mark Carney won Canada’s election this week in what many observers are calling an embrace of Canadian nationalism and rebuke of U.S. President Donald Trump. Carney is a former central banker who became prime minister in March after Justin Trudeau stepped down. He is largely expected to continue the policies adopted by his centrist Liberal predecessor, who supported aligning Canadian law with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the cornerstone of international rights for Indigenous peoples, but also faced criticism for his support for the Trans Mountain oil pipeline. 

Carney’s Conservative opponent Pierre Poilievre embraced a major expansion of domestic oil and gas development and voted against the 2021 bill to ensure Canadian laws are consistent with the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.  

“I am very proud to say that I oppose this bill,” Poilievre said at the time. One study found that if Poilievre won, Canada’s emissions would increase, whereas Carney’s win means the country’s emissions will continue to fall — albeit not low enough to avoid the worst effects of global warming.

Indigenous Climate Action, an advocacy group for Indigenous peoples and climate justice in Canada, said in a statement that Carney was considered the “lesser of two evils” compared to his Conservative opponent but that the organization is concerned that both Carney and Poilievre promised to speed up extractive energy projects in the name of Canadian sovereignty.

“So-called Canadian sovereignty shouldn’t come at the expense of Indigenous sovereignty, nor should it be an excuse to violate our inherent rights,” the organization said. “True climate justice can only be achieved when Indigenous Peoples are given the rightful power to determine the fate of our lands and territories.”

Prior to his election, Carney had a track record of climate advocacy: In 2019, he became the United Nations’ special envoy for climate action and finance, with the goal of drumming up private financing to help countries prevent the earth from warning more than 1.5 degrees. A decade ago, he said the “vast majority of reserves are unburnable” if the world is to avoid the worst-case scenarios of climate change.

Carney’s rhetoric has since shifted. One of his first decisions after replacing Trudeau was to remove the federal carbon tax on fossil fuel usage that was widely criticized for increasing the cost of living, despite data indicating rebates reached more than 80 percent of Canadians. The issue had become a political liability for the Liberal party and scrapping the tax ahead of the election undercut what had become a rallying cry for his opponent. Carney has also promised to fast-track resource development projects to decrease Canada’s reliance on energy imports.

“Build, baby, build,” Carney said in his victory speech this week, a play on Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” motto that refers to ramping up oil production. For Carney, “build, baby, build” expresses his commitment to shoring up Canadian infrastructure, including building half a million affordable housing units and expanding domestic energy production. 

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“It’s time to build new trade and energy corridors working in partnership with the provinces, territories, and Indigenous peoples,” he said in the same speech. “It’s time to build Canada into an energy superpower in both clean and conventional energy.” 

Both Carney and Poilievre embraced constructing energy corridors, but it’s not clear what pipelines or other projects would comprise the corridor Carney has championed. 

Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak, the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, an advocacy organization for Canada’s First Nations, said she is optimistic Carney’s administration will involve Indigenous communities with planning and decision-making as he pursues his aggressive energy development goal.  

“They’re going to have to make sure that they work with First Peoples on whose land Canada is made,” Nepinak said. “First Nations aren’t anti-development but they do want to do things in a balanced and sustainable way because we don’t have another planet to send our children to. We always try to think to the generations ahead: Are we ruining what we have?” 

Carney’s campaign has been full of promises to that effect. “A Mark Carney-led government will: work in full partnership with First Nation, Inuit, and Métis to advance and realize the rights of Indigenous peoples through a distinctions-based approach,” according to his website. A Mark Carney-led government will “support Indigenous-led processes for advancing self-determination,” it continued, and “implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act.” The website frequently described Indigenous peoples as partners and promised to expand funding and services for them. In March, Carney doubled federal infrastructure financing for Indigenous communities from $5 billion to $10 billion.

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Carney has also promised to support Indigenous-led conservation efforts, and “enshrine First Nations’ right to water into law.” He pledged to add at least 10 new national parks or marine conservation areas and 15 new urban parks, and make national park access free this summer. He’s also promised to create new programs to support Arctic Indigenous guardianship over ecosystems and Indigenous climate adaptation.

Carney’s ability to enact his agenda might be hampered by the fact that, unlike with his predecessor Trudeau, the Liberal party did not win a majority of seats in Parliament this week, which will require the party to work with others to pass legislation.

“When the Liberals won a majority under Justin Trudeau in 2015, the government was able to implement major climate policy, like the carbon pollution pricing system and regulations restricting methane,” the Canadian nonprofit news site The Narwhal reported. Carney’s climate goals include making Canada “a world leader in carbon removal and sequestration,” and compared to Trudeau, his platform has been described as “more carrot, less stick.” 

The newly-elected Carney is now facing pressure from energy developers to be friendlier to the oil and gas industry than Trudeau was, as well as calls from environmentalists to take a hard stance against burning more fossil fuels.

“We stopped a far-right government from taking power,” said Amara Possian, Canada team lead at 350.org. “But the real work lies ahead as we build a future where our climate is protected and our communities thrive.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Build, baby, build:’ Canada’s new prime minister wants to make the country into an ‘energy superpower’ on May 2, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Anita Hofschneider.

The advocacy group Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa has condemned the New Zealand government fpr failing to make a humanitarian submission to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) hearings at The Hague this week into Israel blocking vital supplies entering Gaza.

The ICJ’s ongoing investigation into Israeli genocide in the besieged enclave is now considering the illegality of Israel cutting off all food, water, fuel, medicine and other essential aid entering Gaza since early March.

Forty three countries and organisations have been submitting this week — including the small Pacific country Vanuatu (pop. 328,000) — but New Zealand is not on the list for making a submission.

• READ MORE: Saudi Arabian envoy asks ICJ to condemn Israel’s ‘hideous conduct’ in Gaza
• Israel accused at ICJ of using aid as ‘weapons of war’ and trying to ‘destroy’ Palestinian people
• Other ICJ on Gaza reports

Only Israel’s main backer, United States, and Hungary have argued in support of Tel Aviv while other nations have been highly critical.

“If even small countries, such as Vanuatu, can commit their meagre resources to go to make a case to the ICJ, then surely our government can at the very least do the same,” said PSNA national co-chair Maher Nazzal.

He said in a statement that the New Zealand government had gone “completely silent” on Israeli atrocities in Gaza.

“A year ago, the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister were making statements about how Israel must comply with international law,” Nazzal said

NZ ‘avoided blaming Israel’
“They carefully avoided blaming Israel for doing anything wrong, but they issued strong warnings, such as telling Israel that it should not attack the city of Rafah.

“Israel then bombed Rafah flat. The New Zealand response was to go completely silent.

Nazzal said Israeli ministers were quite open about driving Palestinians out of Gaza, so Israel could build Israeli settlements there.

“And they are just as open about using starvation as a weapon,” he added.

“Our government says and does nothing. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon had nothing to say about Gaza when he met British Prime Minister Keir Stamer in London earlier in the month.

“Yet Israel is perpetuating the holocaust of the 21st century under the noses of both Prime Ministers.”

Nazzal said that it was “deeply disappointing” that a nation which had so proudly invoked its history of standing against apartheid and of championing nuclear disarmament, yet chose to “not even appear on the sidelines” of the ICJ’s legal considerations.

ICJ examines Israel’s obligations in Occupied Palestine.  Video: Middle East Eye

“New Zealand cannot claim to stand for a rules-based international order while selectively avoiding the rules when it comes to Palestine,” Nazzal said.

“We want the New Zealand government to urgently explain to the public its absence from the ICJ hearings.

“We need it to commit to participating in all future international legal processes to uphold Palestinian rights, and fulfil its ICJ obligations to impose sanctions on Israel to force its withdrawal from the Palestinian Occupied Territory.”

• Official list of countries and other organisations submitting to the ICJ

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

“They’re mending the soil one week, and then the next week they’re going to start to see these little seedlings pop through the soil, because they’re healthy and they’re happy and they have sunshine, and they’ve watered them,” said Erica Krug, farm-to-school director at Rooted, a Wisconsin nonprofit community agricultural organization that helps oversee the garden. 

Krug stopped by the school that day to join the class, which her team runs together with AmeriCorps. Outdoor programming like this, said Krug, positions students to learn how to grow food — and take care of the planet that bears it. 

First established some 25 years ago, in a historically underserved area that has long struggled with access to healthy food, the small but thriving garden is now a mainstay in the Mendota curriculum. The produce grown there is routinely collected and taken to local food pantries. Later this spring, the third grade class plans to plant watermelon and pumpkin seeds. Come summer, the garden will open to the surrounding community to harvest crops like garlic, tomatoes, zucchini, collards, and squash, and take home what they need.

Farm-to-school work, said Krug, isn’t limited to partnering with farmers to get locally grown foods into school meals, but also includes supporting schools in lower-income neighborhoods with working gardens, and providing students with agricultural and health education they won’t get otherwise. That can take the shape of after-school gardening clubs, field trips to local farms, and cooking classes. “We want kids to understand where their food comes from. We want them to be able to have that experience of growing their own food,” she said. “It’s really, really powerful.” 

Back in January, the Rooted team applied for a $100,000 two-year grant through the Department of Agriculture’s Patrick Leahy Farm to School program, intended to provide public schools with locally produced fresh vegetables as well as food and agricultural education. Rooted had plans to “use a huge chunk of those funds” to continue supporting school garden activities and food programming at three local schools, including Mendota. 

Then, late last month, the United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA, sent them an email announcing the cancellation of funding for grants through the program. The email, shared with Grist, noted that the cancellation is “in alignment with President Donald Trump’s executive order ‘Ending Radical and Wasteful Government and DEI Programs and Preferencing.’” 

The loss of the funds is “so upsetting,” said Krug, and the reasoning provided, she continued, is “ridiculous.” 

“When they talk about ‘Make America Healthy Again,’” Krug argued, “they don’t mean everybody. Because if they’re saying that they’re canceling this program because it’s ‘radical’ and ‘wasteful’ and ‘DEI,’ then that means that they don’t want non-white kids having access to fruits and vegetables.” 

Scenarios like these are playing out across the nation as the USDA, working with the initiative known as the Department of Government Efficiency, continues to cancel funding for multiple food and farm programs. Five USDA programs have had their funding pulled since President Trump’s inauguration, while at least 21 others remain frozen. 

Last month, the agency terminated some $1.13 billion slated to be distributed through the Local Food Purchase Assistance Program and Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program. The move has had a resounding impact on the livelihoods of thousands of people, as charitable organizations have shuttered food donations, regional food hubs cut staff, and small farmers have gone bankrupt. The cancellation of this year’s farm-to-school funding was announced roughly two weeks after the USDA ended the billion-dollar funding stream. 

In prior years, Krug said, “we were being asked ‘What are you doing to address equity? To address diversity? How are you making sure your project is for everyone?’ And now we’re going to be penalized for talking about that.”

The team at Rooted is now working overtime to find other funding sources to continue the work, including hosting a fundraising drive and benefit concert next month at their urban farm site. Krug hopes the proceeds will help offset some of the loss. “We’re not ready to say, without this funding, that we’re going to abandon this program, because we believe so strongly in it,” she said. 

First established by the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, passed in 2010, the Patrick Leahy Farm to School program was created by the Obama administration to address rising hunger and nutritional needs in public schools. The program has since awarded over $100 million in grants to schools that support millions of students in tribal, rural, and urban communities nationwide. 

Nutrition advocates and legislators are calling the USDA’s decision to cancel the farm-to-school funding contradictory to the stated goals of the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again commission. Many see it as a sign that the government is dismantling local food systems — hurting people and the planet. The fallout, experts say, will be gradual, but no less devastating. 

Advocates are also questioning whether it’s legal.  

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“This program is authorized. It’s a direction from Congress for USDA to carry it out. So carrying it out is not optional,” said Karen Spangler, policy director of the nonprofit National Farm to School Network, which advocated for the program. 

From its inception, the program has had a $5 million baseline allocation every year that the legislation mandates, and lawmakers have the ability to add discretionary funds. A total of $10 million was allocated to it for this fiscal year. 

To some policymakers, watching as the USDA revoked the funding came as a shock. A letter penned by federal lawmakers on April 4 urged Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to clarify why the administration “abruptly” cancelled the grants. The letter, spearheaded by longtime anti-hunger advocate Representative James McGovern of Massachusetts, and signed by 37 other House Democrats, also asked Rollins to explain the scope of the cancellation and to clarify “the authority” the agency is using to terminate funding, “given that Congress directed USDA to carry out this program.” 

Though an April 11 deadline for response was given, McGovern told Grist that, as of the time of this story’s publication, they have not received an answer. 

“The Trump Administration is slashing programs that help support our farmers and provide people in communities across the country with better access to local food. It’s pathetic,” said McGovern, who is also a senior member of the House Agriculture Committee. “Termination of these programs has caused tremendous uncertainty for schools, food banks and pantries, farmers, and hardworking families.” 

Grist reviewed the official notice shared with grantees and applicants from the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service, which stated that the agency will not review applications, nor will it award grants this year. The agency did, however, note that it was “making plans for an improved competition funding opportunity.”

In an email, a USDA spokesperson told Grist that, in alignment with Trump’s executive order, the agency had “paused” this year’s Patrick Leahy Farm to School Program competition, and is now “revising the application” for the next fiscal year. 

“Secretary Rollins and the Food and Nutrition Service are committed to creating new and greater opportunities to connect America’s farmers to nutrition assistance programs and Farm to School is a critical component of this work,” the spokesperson added. They also noted that the “updated” application will provide “opportunities to support bold innovations in farm to school that encourage more applicants and better impacts, which reflect the realities of the intent and tremendous progress in farm to school made by states and communities over the past 15 years.” 

The USDA did not address Grist’s requests for clarification about the authority the agency is using to withhold the money, and did not clarify when or how it plans to award it. 

Sophia Kruszewski, a lawyer and deputy policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, explained that the USDA may technically have the legal authority to cancel this year’s grants through the program. In both the underlying statute and the appropriations text, there is language indicating that the funding for this program is to be “available until expended,” which, in most cases, gives the agency the ability to roll over unobligated funding from year to year. 

But Kruszewski isn’t convinced the move is in line with the spirit of the law. “It seems highly doubtful that Congress intended to give the agency carte blanche to simply choose not to spend any of the money directed toward the program,” said Kruszewski, “particularly when the call for proposals has already happened and applicants have spent significant time developing and submitting proposals.”

All the while, Rollins has publicly championed the president’s national nutrition overhaul. Earlier this month, the agriculture secretary joined Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at an elementary school in Alexandria, Virginia. The two spoke to students, staff, and onlookers about the importance of advancing nutrition in public schools. The event took place a little more than a week after the cancellation of the farm-to-school funding. 

“Secretary Kennedy and I have a unique once-in-a-generation opportunity to better align our vision on nutrition-related programs to ensure we are working together to advance President Trump’s vision to make our kids, our families, and our communities healthy again,” said Secretary Rollins in a press release. “Our farmers, ranchers, and producers dedicate their lives to growing the safest most abundant food supply in the world and we need to make sure our kids and families are consuming the healthiest food we produce. There is a chronic health problem in our country, and American agriculture is at the core of the solution.” 

Kennedy, for his part, championed the end of ultra-processed foods in public schools and tightening nutrition program restrictions. During the visit, Rollins underscored how the USDA should be supporting “moving farm-fresh produce, as much as is possible, into the schools.”

Katie Wilson, former Obama administration USDA Deputy Under Secretary of Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services, and executive director of the Urban School Food Alliance, argues that the event, and the USDA’s bigger MAHA campaign, are nothing more than a “facade” to distract from the agency’s subtler efforts to do the opposite. “Having these little kids around you — it’s a camera opp. So that’s the distraction, while I’m over here slicing and dicing the program, right?” Wilson said. “Just remember this funding was for unprocessed, local, fresh food, and so it’s about as healthy and as wonderful as it can get.” 

As for Rollins’ stated goal to bring more local food into schools, Wilson only sees more contradictions. “We’ve been doing that, but you just took the rug completely out from under us,” she said. For larger school districts, planning for budgets, programs, and things like meals runs typically a year out. The loss of the farm-to-school grant and uncertainty about the future of the program means that schools across the country are now scrambling to find money, said Wilson. “Contracts don’t go away just because your funding got cut. Where does that money come from? Do you raise the price of school meals for kids? I mean, what do you do? Do you cut staff?”

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For decades, advocates and policymakers have looked to strengthen local food systems as a plausible solution to rising hunger rates. Localized food systems have also been championed as a climate solution.

The climate footprint of transportation in the food supply chain, or the movement of crops, livestock, and machinery, contributes considerably to global agricultural emissions. Long-distance shipping of perishable fruit and vegetables in particular ramps up the amount of CO2 emissions generated. The same goes for emissions-intensive food waste: The longer the supply chain, the larger the proportion of food typically lost or thrown away. 

According to Jenique Jones, executive director at global nonprofit WhyHunger, small and regional producers are not only much less of a strain on the planet, but they also address systemic issues caused by the “monopoly” that a handful of national producers have on America’s food supply. Localized food systems allow for small farmers to be paid fair wages, she said, and healthier, better quality food to be made accessible to their communities. 

The gutting of grants through this program, along with other recent funding decisions by the USDA, signals to Jones that the administration is intentionally dismantling local food systems — which she believes will bring in big costs. The legislation that underwrote the Leahy program, for one, mandated that the agency prioritize geographic diversity and equitable distribution among tribal, rural, and urban communities. Between 2013 and 2024, roughly one in every 20 farm-to-school projects supported Native communities. 

These cuts show the administration’s priority, she said, which is “definitely not local food systems, and more importantly than that, it’s not people.” 

Among those that may feel some of the harshest burdens from the loss of farm-to-school funding are communities in lower-income, rural swaths of America. One such place is just outside of Bolivar County, in the heart of the Mississippi River Delta, where Sydney Bush has to travel 20 or so miles just to buy fresh vegetables. The closest grocery store is a 40-minute drive from her house. 

Bush works in food justice with the nonprofit Mississippi Farm to School network. Early this year, in partnership with the Cleveland School District, the organization submitted an application for almost $50,000 in a farm-to-school grant. That money would have been used to launch a pilot project to establish procurement plans between regional farmers growing fresh food and the district’s 10 local schools. It would have supported more than 2,800 students. 

The cancellation of the funding pot, a crucial lever in achieving truly local food sovereignty and remedying nutrition inequity across America’s resource-strapped rural communities, said Bush “isn’t just about this pilot not happening, it’s about what comes after.” Without it, groups like hers will have to work twice as hard to fill in the gaps. “Food is power,” she said. “There are folks in this country that don’t have the same access to nutrition as everyone else. It’s a systemic problem.”

Now, because of the rescinded grant, that dream of a localized food chain, the culmination of work that started in 2020, appears to be over before it even began. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s latest USDA cuts undermine his plan to “Make America Healthy Again” on Apr 22, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Ayurella Horn-Muller.

Photograph Source: Government of Thailand – CC BY 2.0

Fallout from the leaked Signal messages between top U.S. cabinet officials is just the latest in an increasing trend of carelessness surrounding national security issues. High-ranking officials who mishandle classified information go unpunished as the political class considers it too politically damaging to enforce harsh penalties. This negligence ensures there will be more careless mishandling in the future.

Neither party is eager to crack down on this issue, and the reason is as simple as human nature: keeping classified material on classified servers at all times takes longer and is less convenient. That’s precisely why several cabinet officials are now in hot water over their use of the app Signal for texting classified information. Yet whenever the party in charge gets caught cutting corners with security, their own come to their defense.

This isn’t a new pattern. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Democrats in the past rallied to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s defense, dismissing many accusations surrounding her use of a privately hosted email server as politically motivated. While they were damaging to her standing with the public, she ultimately was let off from any prosecution in 2016.

It’s clear with the benefit of hindsight—and to many at the time—that her behavior was not just a risk to national security, but illegal as well. Former FBI Director Jim Comey’s now-infamous statement during the summer of 2016admitted as much: “There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.”

So, why wasn’t she charged? The FBI essentially focused on whether there was “intent” to break the law, as well as hesitation to recommend prosecution of the Democratic candidate for president.

This decision has haunted us ever since. Consequences for irresponsibly handling classified information are pointless if they’re never enforced, or only enforced when lower-level officials violate them. Secretary Clinton hired people to install a private server for her emails to be hosted in her basement—there is no shortage of “intent” there.

Similarly, several Trump officials knew better than to discuss war plans on an app like Signal. If you don’t believe me, you need look no further than Secretary Hegseth’s own words just a day ago: “Nobody’s texting war plans.” This, of course, turned out to be a lie.

And just like that, we’re back to discussing Hillary’s handling of her emails. Some have pointed out the hypocrisy of those who called for her prosecution yet defended Hegseth and Walz during this Signal-gate—and they’re right to do so. Others have pointed out the hypocrisy from the left in giving Hillary a free-pass and then calling for action now when the opposite party is in power. They are also right to do so.

Classified material is classified for a reason. Leaks from classified documents have real-world implications. Just look at the damaging fallout from organizations such as WikiLeaks.

National security and lives are at stake when classified information is mishandled, and it’s high time for both parties to hold themselves to account. A key component of Trump’s movement has always been anti-establishment rhetoric and action. Letting these cabinet officials off the hook simply because Hillary received more favorable treatment sends a clear message to future officials: Laws surrounding classified material are merely suggestions, so long as your party is in charge.

The post Hillary Got Off For Her Emails ButThat Doesn’t Make Signal-gate Okay appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kyle Moran.

Photograph Source: I, Aotearoa – CC BY-SA 3.0

“Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” was the key question at the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings during the 1950s McCarthy era. At the height of the anti-Soviet/Communist fear, HUAC cost thousands of people their jobs and created a powerful chill to freedom of speech and association. A similar chill with global consequences has now come to 2000 U.N. agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that receive U.S. funding. An Office of Management and Budget questionnaire asks them to describe with whom and how they do business. It has created stupor and confusion here in Geneva as they ponder how to reply.

Of the questionnaire’s 36 questions, here are five of the most politically charged:

6) “Does your organization have a clear policy prohibiting any collaboration, funding or support for entities that advocate or implement policies contrary to U.S. government interests, national security, and sovereignty? [yes/no]”

11) “Can you confirm that your organization does not work with entities associated with communist, socialist or totalitarian parties, or any party that espouses anti-American beliefs? [yes/no]”

12) “Does this project reinforce U.N. sovereignty by limiting reliance on international organizations or global governance structures (e.g. UN, WHO)? [yes/no]”

13) “Can you confirm that your organization has not received ANY funding from the PRC (including Confucius Institutes and/or partnered with Chinese state or non-state actors), Russia, Cuba, or Iran? [yes/no]”

15) Can you confirm that this is no DEI project or DEI elements of the project? [yes/no]”

Feel the chill? What to do? On March 11, according to Philippe Mottaz who broke the entire questionnaire story, the U.N. Office of Legal Affairs (OLA) sent a directive to the U.N. agencies in Geneva to try to help them respond to the questionnaire. According to Mottaz, the document was sent by email without a heading or signature. The directive said it was “vital” for all the organizations targeted to “adopt a common approach to ensure coherence” in their response as well as “the preservation of the status of the United Nations.” In addition, New York encouraged the agencies to emphasize the importance of cooperation with the United States as well as their historic relations, including reference to the U.N. Charter and the founding role of the U.S.

Trump’s spending freeze had already sent tsunami waves throughout International Geneva. The U.S. Government funded around 47 per cent of the global humanitarian appeal last year. Examples of the consequences of the financial squeeze; the Office of International Migration, funded by almost 40% by Washington, will lay off 20% of its Geneva staff, having already laid off 6000 in the field. The United Nations Fund for Population Activities Regional Director for Asia and the Pacific warned that between 2025 and 2028 in Afghanistan, the absence of U.S. support will likely result in 1,200 additional maternal deaths and 109,000 additional unintended pregnancies.

The U.N. is stifled about how to respond to the questionnaire. What should the agencies do? Risk not responding? Several NGOs have already said they will not answer. But, after all, the United States does fund 22% of the U.N.’s overall budget, the most of any country. Can the agencies risk being defunded or have the U.S. withdraw as it has done at the World Health Organization?

At a recent human rights film festival in Geneva, I asked Adam Kinzinger, the former Republican Congressman from Illinois, “What should we do about the Trump assault?” One of the options I gave were to do nothing, as suggested by James Carville. In an op-ed piece, the Democratic Party strategist’s justification was that Democrats couldn’t win fighting Trump directly. Rather, he wrote in The New York Times, the Trump phenomenon will eventually implode with no direct confrontation needed.

Kinzinger, a former lieutenant colonel in the Air Force who flew missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, did not hesitate to advocate confrontation. The Republican turncoat who served on the House Committee investigating the Capitol attack suggested going directly after Trump. As a former Congressman, he prioritized town meetings to put pressure on members of Congress up for election in the 2026 midterms.

Different Democratic Party reactions to Trump show rifts in the party. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did not attend Trump’s State of the Union address. Some Democrats held up signs during the speech; Rep. Al Green shouted and was thrown out. On the other hand, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer supported Trump and the Republicans on their spending bill.

If Democrats cannot agree on a unified strategy, what are U.N. agencies and non-governmental organizations to do? What kind of agency do the agencies have? Who is Mr. or Ms. Multilateralism? Could a Dag Hammarskjöld, Kofi Annan or Cornelio Sommaruga counter an Elon Musk? To paraphrase Stalin on the Pope; How many divisions has the Secretary-General of the United Nations?

Whether the U.N. agencies respond or not will probably have little effect on Donald Trump’s attitude toward the United Nations and multilateralism. Whereas individuals within the agencies may act against Trump, the question of specific organizations having agency as effective actors is more complicated. Australian National University Professor Toni Erskine has several times perceptively examined the complex question of whether institutions have responsibilities. And the U.N. as a multilateral institution? Not simple for an international institution to counter a country that is its biggest funder.

When people say fascism could never happen in the United States, they should refer back to the McCarthy era and how intimidation works. The simple question, “Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” shook fear into an entire generation. Millions of government employees were required to sign loyalty oaths and submit to background checks under President Truman’s 1947 Federal Employee Loyalty Program.

The United States government’s questionnaire to international organizations and NGOs reeks of McCarthy era intimidation, but on a much broader global scale. The McCarthy era officially ended; HUAC was disbanded, the Loyalty Program repealed. And the Trump era, multilateralism, and the U.N.?

The post Make the World Scared Again: U.S. Threatens U.N. Agencies appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daniel Warner.

Image from the poster for the film I’m Still Here directed by Walter Salles – Fair Use

Last month, I saw the film I Am Still Here directed by Walter Salles, written by a dynamic trio including: Murilo Hauser, Heitor Lorega, and Marcelo Rubens Paiva (Son of Eunice and Rubens Paiva). I am Still Here is about Marcelo’s parents during the tumultuous 1970’s in Brazil at what seems like just the middle of a military dictatorship. The film highlights the actions by the administration of the Military dictatorship, the experience of supporters of liberation: Eunice and Rubens, and the long-term effects of moments of fascist upsurges. 

The military dictatorship began “April 1st 1964 after a coup d’état by the Brazilian Armed Forces, with support from the United States government against president João Goulart.” It lasted until 1985. Goulart was one of the last left-wing presidents of Brazil known during his time as Minister of Labor to work in favor of workers’ demands. While many in elected office at the time refused meetings with working class and poor Brazilian workers while also using their position to siphon public resources for their own greed, Goulart worked to put into place regulations to create a social safety net. 

 The military dictatorship comes at a time in which the U.S. is in the middle of a cold war against what it sees as the threat of communism. Imagine, Bay of pigs happens in 1961. 1962 Kennedy asks Goluart to participate in an invasion of Cuba, to which he says no and two years later, proponents in the military take over the country. 

The film picks up in the 1970’s when forced disappearances are a regular element of a fascist Brazilian society. But what happens once the opening salvo of Fascism has already happened and continues to exist for 20 years, most likely longer than anyone in the 1960’s foresaw. As is human nature, fascism just continues to exist in the background and many become normalized. The film has additional hidden questions including most importantly; Do we all just move on and forget about the initial things we did to openly fight it? Are we still fighting it today with the same level of vigor?

The film plunged me into thinking more about the current time, place and conditions in the US. and while this review weaves in and out of the current mass deportation threat mandated by President elect Donald Trump, there are many more articles in my head of how closely the film also speaks about the time, place and conditions in the U.S. under democratic administrations as well. I can’t help but think about how in South Central LA many of us, including myself under democratic mayors and city council members, have become accustomed to the forced disappearances created by the prison re-enslavement complex. I think about how at the same time that the LAPD budget has raised more than 100% over the last 20 years, so has the Black population decreased due to their tactics of brutalization and incarceration-forced. 

Deportation in the U.S., on stolen land, is a renewed enactment of a very old tactic of forced disappearances (the very subject of this film) by a modern-day fascist government. In fact, the entire carceral system brings into the 21st century an awkwardly legalized mechanism of forced disappearance, in which elected bodies, and institutions alike are almost forced to accept the normality of this system in order to receive resources to continue to exist. As your grandma most certainly told you of the casserole she baked, that you love, but with onions that you hate, “oh don’t worry baby, you won’t even know they’re in there!” 

While many Hollywood films highlight the disappeared person as the centerpiece of their story and end it there, this immensely emotional journey actually focuses on the loved ones of the disappeared, and in doing so makes their disappearance, and its long-term effects the centerpiece of the film. 

When the film picks up in the 1970s former congressman Rubens Paiva is now working as an architect and simply enjoying time with his big, beautiful family and at least to his and many of their friends’ knowledge many of the things he and friends have done to fight fascism is not known to the military government, or so they think.  

Oh, but don’t you just hate how the surveillance state always has a way of rearing its nasty head when you least expect it?  

All of the good times that Reuben and his wife Eunice and children have are set to the short but intense background moments of fascist military trucks holding soldiers rolling down the street, in which everyone holds their breath for just that second, hoping that they don’t hit the brakes and jump out to set their attacks on you. This happens to the Pavia family as they’re on the beach celebrating their daughter’s birthday. Thankfully, the trucks are just rolling down the street this time. 

As many of my elders migrated to the U.S. from Belize in the early 1970’s, today when Trump threatens to challenge birthright citizenship, I and many Belizean Garifuna folks can relate to the feeling of holding our breaths. How far will the challenge go? We don’t know, but we work around in our minds that there is no way that they can challenge our citizenship from 30 years ago. But how long were people in Brazil expecting the dictatorship to last? 

The golden piece of this film however is the unknowing organizer that plays the lead role in the film, Eunice Paiva, wife and mother. When the military dictatorship finally does metaphorically hit the brakes right in front of the Paiva household, Eunice, is radicalized into action as she juggles both keeping her family calm, cool, and collected, while doing all that she can to let her rage out through going to speak to all family friends in a means to insurrect the fascist state. 

As is the case with forced disappearances, members of the army, who are dressed in civilian clothes ask Reuben to come with them and refuse to answer the question of where he is being taken or why he is being taken away. 

But as a filmmaker, if you’re planning to speak about the circumstances of the disappearance, we have to see what happens inside the place of incarceration during the time of a person’s disappearance. The filmmakers, however don’t ever again show us what happens to Reuben, but after he is gone for some time, Eunice is then taken away as well. 

What ensues is a horrible experience where she is forced to put on a black hood, is thrown into a cell, and wakes up day after day for what seems like an eternity and is asked to point out people she knows in an album. What happens is even more sinister than I was ready to confront. When on the first day she speeds through the album and refuses to identify any person, each day, a new person’s picture is added in a sinister threat to that person’s identity both in real life, but also in Eunice’s psychology. Each day she is then forced to point to someone she loves as a means to try to break her spirit, but she never gives them any information that can be used against anyone. In what seems to me like a move to realize that they will not break her spirit, they finally release her back to her home to be reunited with her children.

Eunice then goes on a long journey to prove that the state illegally disappeared her husband and broke up a family after faintly hearing Reuben’s scream as she is walked out of the once abandoned facility that the military has repurposed into an incarceration and interrogation center. 

But only 20+ years later after her own interrogation of family and friends and continuous new ideas of tactics to try, when her children have grown up, and after the military dictatorship is long over, does she and two children get a death certificate and documentation confirming the actions of the military.

In many Hollywood films, that would be the end of the film, but in this case it’s not. We are forced to live past this point as is she, hence the name of the film; I Am Still Here. 

We see a family gathering scene long past this point in which she is nearly despondent and ailing with dementia, when she is almost jolted out of her wheelchair for 2 mins as the documentary on TV speaks about the disappearance of her husband and her fight against it as just one element of the long ended military dictatorship. 

The film comes at a pivotal time in which we must also ask ourselves what will we do when the fascists come knocking on our door? As Trump begins the slow but arduous process of figuring out how to nationalize ICE as a national military force, beginning with his superfluous goal of mass deportation, we must ask ourselves, are we going to, like the Pavia family hold our breaths on the beach and hope they don’t hit the brakes and turn in our direction, or will we fight like Eunice was eventually forced to?

Imagine what it takes for the brakes to be hit on you. You may think that in fact it’s only for leaders of movements on the level of a Dr. King or Malcolm X, but in fact, the film demonstrates that they come for supporters as well. The only reason Reubens was forcibly disappeared was for his role in helping to pass along letters to families of those who had been taken. 

In the end, when the film director reminds us of the Paiva family’s humanity by showing a slideshow of pictures of the “good times” we, everyone in the theater, cried because we knew and know what’s ahead for us all and that it doesn’t matter what happens to us. In the end Reubens did what he could to help no matter the consequences, and we must do the same. 

While many of us have normalized forced disappearances into the daily lived experience of the U.S. only to be shoved out of that delusion by the Trump Administration, Walter Salles calls on us to reflect on the long-term effects of Fascism by taking us on the full trajectory of what is included in a force disappearance, that we, in the case of this film cannot ignore or look away from.

The post Walter Salles’s “I Am Still Here” and the Choices We Must Make Since We Too are Still Here  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Channing Martinez.

The post The News That Didn’t Make the News: Gaza’s Reality, Propaganda, and the Fight for Justice appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

Logo for Five Eyes Alliance – Fair Use

Eight decades after the “Anglosphere” powers (the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) codified their World War intelligence sharing protocols in the 1946 UKUSA Agreement, the “Five Eyes” alliance — named for a  “AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US Eyes Only” classified information designation — may finally find itself retired.

In early March, the Trump administration “paused” sharing intelligence with Ukraine, also forbidding the four other partners from passing along US-gathered intel. Rumor has it that Trump may also want the Canadian “eye” plucked out as one of his trade war tantrums. That, along with Trump’s recent “pro-Russia” lean, has the other four “eyes” considering a separate intelligence-sharing apparatus minus the US.

As an American, I’ve got limited skin in the game on the matter of whether the “Four Eyes” should continue absent US involvement … but I do think that Americans would benefit from the US regime’s withdrawal or expulsion, for several reasons.

First, the US regime massively subsidizes the other four partners. The publicly disclosed US intelligence budget exceeds $80 billion per year and likely comes to far more than that. That’s at least ten times the publicly disclosed intelligence budgets of the other four regimes combined. Even assuming those other regimes operate far more effectively and efficiently, it’s just not a very good deal.

Second, access to intelligence from other “Anglosphere” regimes feeds Washington’s bad habit of, as John Quincy Adams put it, going “abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Those other four regimes are essentially crack dealers who service the US regime’s addiction to a globally ruinous imperial foreign policy.

Third, the arrangement has also been long-known to expose US regime secrets to foreign adversaries, going back at least as far as the 1950s, when British spy Kim Philby passed information to the Soviet Union on US plans and operations in the Korean War.

Finally, the Five Eyes arrangement empowers the domestic US surveillance state that Edward Snowden revealed to the public more than a decade ago. US intelligence operators are legally forbidden to cast their Sauron-like gaze on Americans. They ignore that prohibition themselves … likely with quite a bit of help from the signals intelligence the other four “eyes” provide.

US withdrawal from the Five Eyes, or better yet its complete dissolution, wouldn’t cure the above diseases, but it would reduce the inflammation and ease the symptoms, while leaving all four regimes free to share information at need rather than wholesale.

The post How Losing an Eye Might Make the World a Better Place appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

Photo by Jorge César

President Trump is blowing up the global economy with threats of extortionate tariffs being placed on imports from foreign countries to the US. He sometimes makes the ludicrous claim as in the case of Canada, that it is because Canada “isn’t doing anything” to stop the fentanyl that is allegedly “pouring across the border” into the US with no effort made to stop it. More often, he accuses Canada of unfair trade policies.

The post Why US Automakers Make Vehicles and Source Parts in Canada appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dave Lindorff.

When the U.S. government deported 177 Venezuelans on Feb. 20, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security alleged that 80 of the deportees were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

U.S. news outlets report that members have set up shop in at least 16 states and are “wreaking havoc on communities across the nation.”

According to Fox News, in February 2025 there was an “infestation” of Tren de Aragua members in an apartment building in Aurora, Colorado.

Suspected Tren de Aragua members have been arrested in Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, California, Texas and other states.

The U.S. State Department went so far as to designate Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization in an effort to stop “the campaigns of violence and terror committed by international cartels and transnational organizations.”

There is little reliable information about Tren de Aragua – but no shortage of sensationalist news reports and Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids claiming to target them.

We are sociologists who have spent a combined 37 years researching gangs, crime and policing in Venezuela. Our research in Venezuela, and our colleagues’ research in other countries, suggests that incarceration and mass deportations of Venezuelans living in the U.S., whether they have ties to the group or not, will likely strengthen Tren de Aragua rather than cripple it.

Indeed, we have already seen how these strategies contributed to the expansion of street gangs in El Salvador and Honduras by creating new opportunities for members to network and become more organized.

What is Tren de Aragua?

According to investigative journalists and a handful of academic studies, Tren de Aragua was initially founded by Hector “El Niño” Guerrero and two other men in 2014. The three men were imprisoned in Tocorón prison in the state of Aragua.

By 2017, Tren de Aragua began to be known as a “megabanda,” a category the local press in Venezuela use to refer to large organized criminal groups. The term arose to highlight the size of some street gangs, which at the time was unprecedented in Venezuela.

Since its beginning, the gang has depended heavily on extortion. It also sells street drugs, but that has been a much less important source of revenue for it.

Tren de Aragua’s growth surged as a result of mass incarceration policies that began under Venezuela’s former President Hugo Chávez and expanded under current President Nicolás Maduro. Incarceration rates began to increase in 2009 and were exacerbated by police raids deployed in 2010 in marginalized neighborhoods across the country. Venezuela’s prisons became filled with young, poor men.

Crowded together in inhumane conditions, the men began to organize into prison gangs with clear hierarchies. They accumulated vast profits by charging prisoners fees for food, use of space and protection from inmate violence. They also opened and ran businesses, including a club, inside Tocorón prison.

Members of different gangs in and outside the prison also began to communicate and share information about criminal activities such as kidnapping and extortion. This strengthened social networks and expanded their illegal enterprises.

Tren de Aragua eventually took control of Tocorón prison as the government became unable to manage daily life inside its walls. It had become one of the largest and best organized gangs in Venezuela.

Criminal enterprise grows

Since 2014, an economic and humanitarian crisis has devastated Venezuela, causing many Venezuelans to migrate.

Venezuela had one of the highest displacement rates in the world between 2014 and 2018, when at least 3 million people left the country.

Tren de Aragua, still based in the Tocorón prison at that time, took advantage of this mass migration. It expanded the group’s business portfolio to include human trafficking and sexual exploitation of Venezuelan female migrants in Chile, Colombia and Peru.

It’s unclear how far beyond Venezuela Tren de Aragua has spread. While the group has certainly expanded operations into the Latin American countries mentioned above, research shows common criminals have posed as Tren de Aragua members in both Colombia and Chile.

Moreover, the arrest of alleged Tren de Aragua members for committing crimes in the U.S. and other countries does not mean that the gang has set up shop in those places. Gang members, same as non-gang members, migrate during crises. They may continue to commit crimes in new places after they arrive. However, it’s important to note that immigration in the U.S. is consistently linked with decreases – not increases – in both violent crime and property crime.

Even some local police departments have questioned the gang’s expansion into the U.S.

In Aurora, police refuted both the mayor’s and President Donald Trump’s claims about the apartment complex being taken over by the gang. And the New York Police Department recently reported that suspected Tren de Aragua members there are largely focused on snatching mobile phones and robbing department stores – hardly the crimes of a transnational criminal empire or terrorist organization.

Making matters worse

Deportations do not address the urgent situation faced by many migrants who leave their homelands in search of a better, safer future.

When governments prioritize the spectacle of deportations to deal with migration, they contribute to the expansion of even more resilient networks of criminal enterprises.

Recent history bears this out.

In El Salvador in the 1990s and early 2000s, incarceration, deportations and repressive policing policies contributed to the evolution of youth street gangs such as the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, into transnational extortion rackets that spread across Central America.

These same policies could also contribute to the growth of Tren de Aragua within Latin America.

Prison isolates large groups of excluded and marginalized people and constrains them to brutal conditions. This enables and encourages the social networks that fuel illegal markets and criminal activity beyond the walls of prisons.

Rising xenophobia

Another harmful outcome of the policies we have discussed here is that they may fuel xenophobia toward and criminalization of Venezuelan immigrants living in the U.S.

This closes off opportunities and harms people already devastated by economic, political and humanitarian crises in their home country.

Venezuelans have responded with their characteristically incisive and biting humor.

Many have used social media to parody news outlets and political speeches, and Venezuelans regularly post memes and videos that mock the automatic association made between them and Tren de Aragua.

The satiric news site El Chigüire Bipolar posted stories titled “The United States confirms that Venezuelans are Tren de Aragua members from birth” and “ICE agents detain newborn that might be Tren de Aragua leader in the future.”

Meanwhile, recent cuts in U.S. foreign aid to countries with large Venezuelan populations, such as Colombia and Peru, will likely exacerbate the migration crisis by constraining opportunities for Venezuelans.

Future waves of migrants will be easy prey for criminal organizations like Tren de Aragua, which has turned human trafficking into a lucrative business. And with current policies of cutbacks, incarceration and repression, Tren de Aragua will likely continue to grow and fill its coffers.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post The Origins of the Venezuelan Gang Tren de Aragua and Why US Policies May Only Make it Stronger appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Verónica Zubillaga – Rebecca Hanson.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Idaho lawmakers are moving forward with modest efforts to improve the state’s system for investigating deaths, following reports by ProPublica and others that identified major problems. At the same time, counties are moving to shield from public view records that ProPublica relied on in its coverage.

“Before you today is a bill that is a long time coming, and I say that because over the course of decades, since the 1950s, there have been attempts to reform our coroner system,” state Sen. Melissa Wintrow told lawmakers on Feb. 26, in a nod to ProPublica reporting last year.

The Democrat’s bill would spell out new parameters that clarify a coroner’s role. Where current law says “suspicious” deaths should be investigated, the bill lists circumstances such as a suspected drug overdose or a death on the job. It also makes clear that a law enforcement investigation doesn’t take the place of a coroner’s investigation and that the two should happen in parallel. It requires autopsies to be done by a forensic pathologist, not another kind of doctor.

The legislation crossed its first hurdle last week when it passed in the Republican-controlled Idaho Senate with broad support.

Wintrow said coroners’ investigations must be done right.

“If you’ve seen some of the news reports lately, there are families that are upset because we have not consistently been doing this across our state,” she told lawmakers, “and it is imperative that we do that.”

Last year, a report commissioned by Idaho lawmakers highlighted faults in a system of elected coroners — a system dating to the 19th century — that is marked by limited training, almost no state funding and an absence of statewide standards. The report noted that Idaho ranks last among states for conducting autopsies in suspicious, unexpected and unnatural child deaths.

ProPublica later reported on two grieving parents’ experience with a coroner who did little investigation to identify what caused their baby’s death. ProPublica also used legislative and newspaper archives to pinpoint numerous warnings about Idaho’s coroner system and failed attempts to reform it going back more than 70 years.

What’s different this time is that coroners, a group that has opposed past efforts, drafted the legislation that Wintrow introduced. It’s been in the works since the February 2024 state report, by the Idaho Legislature’s Office of Performance Evaluations, that took aim at the coroner system.

But the proposed legislation does not address some of the key problems identified by the state watchdog agency or ProPublica’s investigation.

ProPublica’s review of hundreds of Idaho coroner reports found little consistency in what coroners did to investigate each death. Some coroners followed national standards; others didn’t. Some ordered autopsies in sudden infant deaths and unexpected child deaths; others didn’t. Other states spell out types of deaths for which an autopsy is required every time.

Idaho requires only 24 hours of training every two years, but ProPublica found that 1 in 4 coroners repeatedly fell short. Other states impose consequences for skipping required training.

Wintrow has tempered expectations about a rapid overhaul, saying her bill is not meant to be comprehensive. She called it a starting point that has the support of the Idaho coroners association.

“Is this the end-all, be-all bill? No, but it is the best start we have had, and will increase consistency in our state,” she said on the Senate floor.

Meanwhile, hearings on Wintrow’s proposal triggered an attempt by counties to wall off coroners’ records from public view in Idaho.

One man testified that his teenage daughter, who had epilepsy, died while taking a bath and that his grief was compounded by knowing investigators possessed photographs taken in her death investigation. In response, Wintrow said she asked the Idaho coroners and sheriffs associations for a way to keep such materials private.

(Although courts have ruled that the dead aren’t entitled to the same personal privacy protections as the living, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling found that the privacy interests of survivors justified withholding autopsy images from the public.)

It turned out that the Idaho Association of Counties had a bill ready to go. But rather than simply protecting photographs of bodies, the proposal would make the entirety of a coroner’s investigation exempt from open records law. All the public could see would be a name, age, gender, hometown and cause of death — not the underlying steps coroners take to reach conclusions.

According to the association, the idea came from the coroner of Ada County, home to Boise. Rich Riffle, the Ada County coroner, told ProPublica that a county attorney drafted the proposal based on Riffle’s goal to have Idaho treat coroner records more like law enforcement records.

Police records are available for public inspection in Idaho, with exceptions, such as when police are still actively investigating a crime and releasing their records could imperil the case.

“Although we are separate and independent from law enforcement, that doesn't mean we want to jeopardize a criminal case, and that’s essentially the bottom line,” he said in an interview Wednesday.

Last year’s state watchdog report also recommended lawmakers consider ensuring disclosure of coroners’ records doesn’t impede a criminal case or violate a family’s privacy. It did not specify creating a broad ban.

Ada County initially denied ProPublica’s request last year for coroner investigative records on the deaths of children, for whom Idaho conducts autopsies at a particularly low rate. Similar record requests went to nine other Idaho counties.

After months of negotiation, Ada County began providing heavily redacted records once ProPublica agreed to pay more than $880 for them.

In Bonneville County, which also resisted disclosure, such records revealed the coroner’s failure to follow national standards. The death of 2-month-old Onyxx Cooley, for example, was determined to be a sudden infant death — one with no explanation — after a terse, one-page report and no autopsy. The since-retired coroner, Rick Taylor, noted that state law didn’t set standards for investigations and said that he relied on an emergency doctor’s opinion.

Most coroners approached by ProPublica released their records after attorneys redacted information they said was protected by state law. Photos weren’t included.

In lending its support to exempting coroner records from disclosure last fall, the association of counties wrote: “While a person may be deceased, their reputation is still subject to harm. Next of kin may also be subject to harm by the release of their loved one’s private medical information, and sensitive information surrounding the circumstances of their death. Given these rights, there is limited public value in the release of detailed information in someone’s death.”

Wintrow saw the draft bill during this year’s legislative session and agreed to sponsor it. But the bill’s future is uncertain.

After fielding questions from ProPublica about the bill last week, Wintrow and a lobbyist for the counties said they want to revisit the legislation before they move forward.

Wintrow said she wants coroners to be treated like law enforcement when it comes to open records laws.

“My intention always as a lawmaker is to make sure there’s good balance with everything, so that privacy is maintained and the interest of the public is maintained as well,” Wintrow told ProPublica last week.

Kelli Brassfield, a lobbyist for the counties association, said, “After some discussion, it looks like the language may need to be amended. We are currently working on this.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Audrey Dutton.

President Trump on Tuesday once again focused on the importance of securing the U.S. border and criticized former President Biden’s so-called open border policies. He accused Biden of allowing migrants to “overwhelm” towns like Aurora, Colorado, and Springfield, Ohio, and pushed for even more funding to implement his campaign promise of mass deportations. The Trump administration is “doubling down on creating this image that immigrants are to blame for every single one of their problems,” says longtime immigrant rights activist Erika Andiola.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The Democrat from Michigan, who served four terms in the Senate after two terms in the House of Representatives, is fond of saying, “You don’t have an economy unless somebody makes something and somebody grows something.” Over the course of her career, she proved to be a skilled negotiator — securing incremental, bipartisan changes to the nation’s farm bill, the legislative package that defines United States agricultural policy roughly every five years.

Stabenow secured funding for urban agriculture, farmers markets, and growers of so-called specialty crops — such as tree nuts, fruits, and vegetables — which are defined in opposition to commodity crops like soybeans and wheat. In her final years in Congress, she argued that the farm bill should evolve to include more climate solutions. Stabenow pushed to keep or expand funding for programs that incentivized farmers to adopt land practices that help reduce emissions, like planting cover crops in fields during the off-season and restoring wetlands on their property. But last year, she found that just the mention of the term “climate” caused talks to fall apart.

“I could not get my counterpart to negotiate,” Stabenow told Grist at a recent conference in northern Michigan, referring to John Boozman, the Republican senator from Arkansas who worked alongside her in the upper chamber’s agricultural committee. “Unfortunately, the term ‘climate’ has been so polarizing,” she added. (A representative for Boozman declined to comment for this article.) 

Stabenow’s career — the ways she managed to expand the farm bill and the ways she couldn’t — speaks to how difficult it has become for lawmakers to fund climate initiatives. Now, she warns that those elected to the 119th Congress should be wary of attempts to roll back environmental progress.

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Ayurella Horn-Muller & Izzy Ross

The U.S. agricultural sector contributes about 10 percent of the nation’s climate-warming emissions, according to an estimate from the Environmental Protection Agency. Just over half of those emissions come from the way farms manage agricultural soils, which can release nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. Livestock — and the manure they produce, depending on how it’s stored — are also major sources of methane emissions on farms. 

Historically, most farm bills have focused neither on reducing agricultural emissions nor on the impacts of the climate crisis on farms, such as the way severe storms, drought, and extreme heat impact crop production. But in recent years, there have been more discussions in Congress and among farmers about whether and how the farm bill should adapt to address these dynamics. 

“We’ve seen increased impacts since the last farm bill was passed,” said Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which advocates for equitable food systems. He added that “farmers know” when their work is being hampered by climate change. 

Today, there’s still no new farm bill, even though it’s more than a year overdue. Last year, Congress extended the 2018 farm bill until September 2025, along with around $31 billion in aid for farmers. 

Passing the omnibus bill, which encompasses programs as diverse as food stamps, rural economic development, and ethanol, didn’t always take this long. Stabenow worked on five farm bills and during that time was able to increase funding and create programs for U.S. farmers big and small. “I had a lot of clout because of my seniority in chairing the Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee,” said Stabenow, who served two stints as chair and was the ranking Democrat on that Senate committee from 2015 to 2021. “So I could block and tackle.” When Democrats in Congress wrote the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which would wind up being the biggest climate spending bill in history, Stabenow fought to include almost $40 billion in funding for climate-smart agriculture, forestry and rural energy programs.

The money for climate-smart agriculture would prove to be particularly controversial. The term refers to practices that are believed to reduce emissions or sequester carbon on farms, but some groups and lawmakers argue the category is too broad to actually be meaningful. Still, in her final months in Congress, Stabenow sought to secure future funding for conservation programs and climate-smart agriculture, submitting a roughly 1,400-page draft resolution of the farm bill to the Senate, even though it had virtually no chance of passing. 

Stabenow’s draft text included a provision that would have ensured leftover money for climate-smart agricultural practices from the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, would be included in the next farm bill. This became one of the main irreconcilable differences between her and her Republican counterparts in the House and Senate. 

Stabenow said it was important to name climate change in these discussions and explain why reducing emissions matters. Climate change is wreaking havoc on farmers: For instance, cherry orchards in Michigan have recently struggled with unseasonably warm and wet conditions. On the East Coast, farmers dealt with unprecedented drought and wildfires this past fall, which most in the region had never before encountered. “When discussing policy, we need to connect the dots,” she said in an email to Grist.

Despite staunch gridlock in Congress, Stabenow insists that policies aiming to curb emissions from agricultural lands are common-sense.

“When you talk to people about conservation programs and keeping carbon in the soil and protecting our land and our water from runoff with pesticides and so on, farmers all support that,” she said. “They are all doing these practices.”

Indeed, according to the American Farm Bureau, a leading industry advocacy group, U.S. farmers have increased their use of cover crops by 75 percent over the past 10 years while also increasing adoption of other practices that trim emissions. 

However, some in the industry worry that allocating money exclusively for climate programs excludes farmers from directing it to other important uses. The Republican House agriculture committee chair, Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania, wrote in an op-ed last year that farmers should have more flexibility in how to use federal dollars. Environmental groups, meanwhile, have questioned the effectiveness of certain programs deemed “climate-smart” under the IRA, such as spending on methane digesters, which create fuel out of animal manure. 

Even before she advocated to extend the IRA’s climate-smart spending, Stabenow pushed for policies that boosted food security and environmental conservation. Though not explicitly labeled as climate solutions, these provisions help make farms and our food system more resilient against shocks from extreme weather and other impacts of global warming. The 2018 farm bill, which Stabenow led negotiations for, provided $428 billion over its first five years, with 7 percent of that total aimed at conservation programs. 

A major focus of Stabenow’s career was increasing support for specialty crops — those fruits, vegetables, herbs, and tree nuts — through farm bill programs. These make up a big chunk of U.S. crop production value — up a quarter in 2020, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department — but it took until 2008 for Congress to specifically include research and funding for them in the farm bill. Specialty crop growers have benefitted from Stabenow’s work to ensure they had better access to crop insurance and block grants, which in turn helps them address disease and volatile weather, said Jamie Clover Adams, the executive director of the Michigan Asparagus Advisory Board.  

Support for specialty crops is not explicitly a climate solution. However, experts say that diversifying our food system can boost resilience against extreme weather. Additionally, certain land management practices used in specialty crop farming can help lessen its impact on the environment; cover crops planted in barren fields during the fall and winter, for example, help remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in the soil. Rotating the kinds of crops grown on specialty farms can also improve soil health, which in turn makes crops more resilient to climate impacts.

It made sense for Stabenow to take up the mantle for specialty crops: Michigan, which is one of the country’s most agriculturally diverse states, produces around 300 products and is a leading grower of fruits and vegetables like tart cherries and asparagus. (In her farewell speech to Congress, Stabenow said, “I have frequently said that you can see Michigan on every page of the farm bills I have written.”) Her work on food and agricultural policy was often popular across party lines: She won endorsements from industry groups like the Michigan Farm Bureau, which often supports Republicans. In fact, once Stabenow’s seat was vacant, the Michigan Farm Bureau endorsed Republican candidate Mike Rogers as her replacement. (The race was narrowly won by Democrat Elissa Slotkin.) 

Stabenow’s commitment to a wide variety of agriculture is even visible on the walls of the Senate agriculture committee room in Washington, D.C., where portraits of committee chairs hang. Stabenow’s portrait is filled with asparagus, cucumbers, corn, pumpkins, peppers, carrots, turnips, potatoes, peaches, apples, blueberries, tart cherries, and geranium flowers, as well as dairy cows in the background. “Even when she’s not there, it’s going to be a constant reminder that we exist and that we are part of farm policy,” said Adams of the Michigan Asparagus Advisory Board. 

It was her commitment to specialty crop farmers that made Stabenow widely known and respected by advocates of sustainable food systems. (She’s been called the “specialty crop queen” by agriculture industry leaders.) Her work on past farm bills showed that investment in one type of agriculture “doesn’t have to be to the detriment of other types of farming,” said Lavender, from the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. 

After Stabenow’s retirement, fellow Democrats on the committee lauded her work on climate policy in agriculture. She “leaves behind an impactful legacy from her work as a champion for nutrition, local food systems, and conservation,” said Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey in an email. 

But Stabenow’s interest in expanding the scope of the farm bill also sparked criticism from those who believed she did not do enough to protect commodity farmers, such as corn, soy, and cotton growers. In November 2024, when she released the text of her draft farm bill, Boozman called it “insulting.” The two lawmakers were split on a number of key issues — like how much funding should go towards conservation programs and food assistance programs. Boozman, now the Senate agriculture committee chair, has repeatedly said efforts should be focused squarely on securing better economic outlooks for U.S. farmers. 

In early February, he invited farmers to share stories of recent financial hardship with the Senate agriculture committee. One of them said, “I can say without a doubt that it was the most difficult year financially that we have endured so far. This year, I’m even more worried about what is to come.” 

Farmers have indeed been hit by declining profits for two years in a row. Research shows severe weather is at least part of the reason why. For her part, Stabenow hopes lawmakers will continue supporting small, diverse farming operations — while pushing for climate and conservation. 

“Conservation practices in general are a win-win, because it’s about keeping carbon in the soil, about keeping soil on the land and not running off into lakes and streams,” she said. “Focusing on what we call climate-smart conservation is really just doubling down on those things that are most effective at being able to capture carbon.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline One senator’s lonely quest to make the farm bill more sustainable on Feb 27, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Frida Garza.

This should be non-negotiable.

Winning an election does not give President Trump—or any politician—the authority to sidestep the Constitution and remake the government at will.

That’s not how a constitutional republic works, even in pursuit of the so-called greater good.

Thus far, those defending the Trump administration’s worst actions, which range from immoral and unethical to blatantly unconstitutional, have resorted to repeating propaganda and glaring non-truths while insisting that the Biden administration was worse.

“They did it first” and “they did it worse” are not justifications for disregarding the law.

For that matter, omitting the Constitution from the White House website—pretending it never existed—does not give the president and the agencies within the Executive Branch the right to circumvent the rule of law or, worse, nullify the Constitution.

Mounting a populist revolution to wrest power from the Deep State only to institute a different Deep State is not how you make America great again.

How you do something is just as important as why you do something, and right now, the means by which the Trump administration is attempting to accomplish many of its end goals are antithetical to every principle on which this nation was founded: natural rights, popular sovereignty, the rule of law, the rejection of monarchical law, the need for transparency and accountability, due process, liberty, equality, and limited government, to name just a few.

Whether the concerns driving this massive overhaul of the government are legitimate is not the question. We are certainly overdue for a reckoning when it comes to our bloated, corrupt, unaccountable, out-of-control bureaucracy.

So far, however, the Trump administration’s policies have exacerbated government dysfunction, undermined constitutional rights, and deepened public distrust.

Trump is not making America great again. In fact, things are getting worse by the day.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the erosion of fundamental freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights. Government officials are muzzling the press, threatening protesters, and censoring online speech. Due process is being ignored altogether.

The government’s haphazard, massive and potentially illegal firing spree is leaving whole quadrants of the government understaffed and unable to carry out the necessary functions of government as it relates to veterans, education, energy, agriculture, and housing.

Rather than draining the swamp of corrupt, moneyed interests, Trump has favored the oligarchy with intimate access to the halls of power.

Rather than reducing the actual size of the government, it appears that the groundwork is being laid by Trump’s administration to replace large swaths of the federal workforce with artificial intelligence-powered systems, expanding automation rather than shrinking bureaucracy.

Despite claims of saving the country billions through massive layoffs and terminations, cancelled leases and contracts, and the discovery of wasteful or corrupt spending, the supporting documentation provided by DOGE, the so-called department of efficiency headed up by Elon Musk, has been shown to be riddled by errors and miscalculations.

While claiming to cut back on wasteful government spending in order to balance the federal budget, Trump is pushing to raise the debt ceiling by $4 trillion while adding at least that much in tax cuts to benefit corporations and billionaires, all of which would be paid for by the already overburdened middle- and lower-classes.

Despite campaign promises to bring down prices “on Day One,” inflation is on the rise again and financial markets are tumbling on fears that Americans will be the ones to pay the price for Trump’s threatened tariffs.

In defiance of states’ rights and in a complete about-face given his own past statements about the authority of state and local governments, Trump is increasingly attempting to browbeat the states into compliance with the dictates of the federal government. Historically, legal precedent has tended to favor the states, whose sovereignty rests in the Tenth Amendment.

All appearances to the contrary, Trump is not so much scaling back the nation’s endless wars as he appears to be genuflecting to authoritarian regimes in the hopes of building an international authoritarian alliance with fascist governments, while announcing plans to seize other countries’ lands, a clear act of military provocation.

Trump’s eagerness to expand the U.S. prison system and impose harsher punishments, including the death penalty, would inevitably result in more American citizens being locked up for nonviolent crimes. The Trump administration has also floated the idea of imprisoning American “criminals” in other countries.

Then you have Trump’s frequent references to himself as an imperial ruler (the White House even shared images of Trump wearing a royal crown), coupled with his repeated trial balloon allusions to running for a third term in contravention of the 22nd Amendment, which bars presidents from being elected more than twice.

Nothing adds up.

Not the numbers, not the policies, not the promises.

If Trump continues to put into power people who are more loyal to him than they are to the Constitution, the consequences will be dire.

Nullifying the Constitution is not how you make America great again.

Trump may not have been given a mandate to act as a dictator or a king, but he was given a mandate to rein in a government that had grown out of control.

That mandate came with one iron-clad condition, which Trump swore to abide by: the U.S. Constitution.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, no government official should be allowed to play fast and loose with the rule of law.

So where does that leave us?

The job of holding the government accountable does not belong to any one person or party. It belongs to all of us, “We the people,” irrespective of political affiliations and differences of race, religion, gender, education, economics, social strata or any other labels used to divide us.

No politician, of any party, will save America.

Only the Constitution—and the people who defend it—can do that.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, issued the following statement in response:

“Maybe in the DOGE boys’ video game simulations, it doesn’t matter if they lay off hundreds of staff from the FAA. In the real world, however, it will make flying less safe and make the next air travel disaster more likely.

“Just like having fewer people safeguarding the nation’s nuclear arsenal will make the risk of nuclear accident much greater.

“The Musk rampage through government is making it virtually certain that we will suffer through otherwise avoidable health, safety and economic catastrophes. Cutting the Forest Service increases fire risk, cutting the CDC and blocking information sharing risks worsening infectious disease outbreaks, cutting the CFPB guarantees Big Bank and predatory loan ripoffs, cutting FDA staff increases the risk for dangerous devices, drugs and food additives, cutting the EPA will increase the risk of mass toxic exposures and on and on.

“If permitted to proceed, the mindless Musk-Trump governmental annihilation is going to touch every American community, imposing tragedy upon tragedy.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

On Jan. 10, the U.S. Department of Justice released a 123-page report on the 1921 racial massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which claimed several hundred lives and left the thriving Black neighborhood of Greenwood in smoldering ruins. The department’s investigation determined that the attack was “so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence.” While it conceded that “no avenue of prosecution now exists for these crimes,” the department hailed the findings as the “federal government’s first thorough reckoning with this devastating event,” which “officially acknowledges, illuminates, and preserves for history the horrible ordeals of the massacre’s victims.”

“Until this day, the Justice Department has not spoken publicly about the race massacre or officially accounted for the horrific events that transpired in Tulsa,” said Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, in announcing the report. “This report breaks that silence through a rigorous examination and a full accounting of one of the darkest episodes of our nation’s past. This report reflects our commitment to the pursuit of justice and truth, even in the face of insurmountable obstacles.”

Only two weeks later, the department took a strikingly different action regarding the historical record of a violent riot: It removed from its website the searchable database of all cases stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol that were prosecuted by the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

These jarringly discordant actions were, of course, separated by a transfer of power: the inauguration of President Donald Trump, who swiftly moved to issue pardons, commute prison sentences and request case dismissals for all of the 1,500-plus people charged with crimes on Jan. 6, including seditious conspiracy and assaulting police officers. That sweeping clemency order — “Fuck it, release ’em all,” Trump said, according to Axios — prompted a wave of outrage, and criticism even from some Republicans. “I’ve always said that when you pardon people who attack police officers, you’re sending the wrong signal to the public at large,” said South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham.

The removal of the database happened more quietly, but it is worthy of notice in its own right. It signals the Trump administration’s intention to not only spare the president’s supporters any further consequences for their role in the riot, but to erase the event from the record — to cast it into the fog of confusion and forgetting in which the Greenwood massacre had existed for so long.

As some have noted, this push to whitewash recent history carries a disconcerting echo of countless autocratic regimes, from the Chinese Communist Party’s memory-holing of the Tiananmen Square massacre to the Argentine military junta’s “disappearing” of dissidents in the 1970s. It comes at the same time as the administration is also seeking to whitewash the teaching of American history, more generally: Trump issued an executive order on Jan. 29 titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” that threatens to withhold federal funds from schools that teach that the country is “fundamentally racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory” and instructs the government to “prioritize federal resources, consistent with applicable law, to promote patriotic education.” One wonders: Would teaching the Tulsa massacre be allowed?

But the removal of the database is troubling for another reason, too: It undermines our ability to consider the events of Jan. 6 in all their complexity and particularity.

I was made aware of that complexity when I spent several days after the riot immersing myself in the more than 500 smartphone videos that participants had shared on the Parler social-media app, for an essay accompanying ProPublica’s compilation of the video trove. What struck me perhaps more than anything else about the videos was the sheer diversity of the motivations, profiles and actions that they put on display. Yes, seen from afar, the mob seemed to assume the unity of purpose of a single, organized mass bent on destruction.

But seen in the close-up of the videos, heterogeneity emerged. There were young women with puffy jackets and pompom hats, middle-aged women who could have been coming straight from a business lunch, young men furtively removing their black tactical gear under the cover of a tree to pull on red MAGA sweatshirts to pass as mere Trump supporters. There were people viciously attacking police officers and denigrating them (“You should be ashamed, fucking pansies”), others pleading with them not to (“Do not throw shit at the police!” “Do not hurt the cops!”) and still others thanking the cops who were arriving on the scene (“Back the blue! We love you!”). There were people smashing in windows and others decrying them for doing so (“Oh, God no. Stop! Stop!” “What the fuck is wrong with him?” “He’s Antifa!”) There were people who, in a matter of moments, swung from being pitchfork-carrying marauders to wide-eyed tourists, as they deferentially asked a Capitol police officer for directions or swung their cameras up to capture the inside of the dome. (“This is the state Capitol,” an awestruck man says to his young female companion.)

This was the great, necessary undertaking of the four-year effort by the Department of Justice: to draw distinctions for the sake of allocating individual accountability. By poring over countless such videos and other evidence, investigators zeroed in on the hundreds of people who could be identified as engaging in and instigating the most violence. There was Daniel Rodriguez, who could be seen on camera driving a stun gun into the neck of Officer Michael Fanone; he was sentenced to more than 12 years. There was Thomas Webster, a former New York City police officer and member of the Marine Corps who swung a metal flagpole at an officer; he got 10 years. There was Peter Schwartz, a Pennsylvania welder who attacked the police with a chair and chemical spray; he got 14 years.

Watch video ➜

Inevitably, some of the outcomes were ripe for second-guessing. Kerstin Kohlenberg, the former U.S. correspondent for Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper, reported recently on the case of Stephen Randolph, a 34-year-old Kentucky man who received an eight-year sentence for his role in pushing over one of the metal security barriers on the Capitol grounds, injuring a police officer in the process; others in the same group received much milder sentences. Trump and his allies could have chosen to comb through cases and pardon only the defendants who they could argue had been painted with too broad a brush.

But that’s not what Trump did. Instead, he himself took up the broadest brush possible and wiped it all clear. In doing so, he let the defendants off the hook. But in another sense, with the mass pardon and deletion of the database, he deprived all of the Jan. 6 participants of individual agency, of individuality, period. In a sense, he rendered them just what the most ardent castigation on the other side had cast them as from the outset: a mindless mob.

As chance has it, at the end of Trump’s first week in office, I was in Tulsa. I went to the Greenwood Rising museum, which tells the story of the rise of the neighborhood and its sudden destruction. It is a powerful presentation despite the dearth of documentation of the violence: snatches of oral history from survivors play over a video simulation of gunfire and arson; before and after photos capture the near-total obliteration of the neighborhood’s prospering commercial core by first the attack and later urban renewal.

One of the museum’s central preoccupations is the attempt by Tulsa authorities and leading white denizens to downplay the massacre, by framing it as a “Negro uprising”; only a couple decades afterward, the museum notes, many in Tulsa were barely aware it happened at all. This cover-up came with lasting consequences for Greenwood survivors, who were denied insurance claims for their destroyed homes, not to mention any form of civic restitution.

Even now, many Black residents of Tulsa are left wondering why the reckoning represented by the Department of Justice investigation is not joined by substantive reparations of any sort. The last two living survivors of the massacre, Lessie Benningfield Randle and Viola Fletcher, said in a statement responding to the report, “The DOJ confirms the government’s role in the slaughter of our Greenwood neighbors but refuses to hold the institutions accountable under federal law.” Still, they said, “We are relieved to see one of the biggest coverups in American history come crashing down.”

And now, back in Washington, the federal government has embarked on an entirely new cover-up of another day of enormous violence. The erasure will not be nearly as successful this time around. There are, after all, all those videos, which live on ProPublica’s website, among other places, while much of the deleted database can be found on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. (And ProPublica is one of 10 media organizations that have jointly sued the federal government, seeking to obtain 14,000 hours of Jan. 6 surveillance footage.)

But for the time being, at least, those seeking to preserve the record of one of the darkest days in recent U.S. history will be doing so, like the survivors of Greenwood and other outbursts of violence around the world, in direct opposition to their own government.

Alex Mierjeski and Agnel Philip contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Alec MacGillis.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Three months after Missouri voters enshrined reproductive rights in the state constitution, abortion remains unavailable as the state’s main provider fights legal hurdles to resume offering the procedure.

At the same time, opponents of abortion in the state Legislature, stung by the passage of Amendment 3 in November, have filed a raft of bills aimed at thwarting implementation of the measure or undercutting its goals while they try to find a unified strategy to prevent the return of abortion services.

This week, state lawmakers held a hearing on a conservative-backed plan to put a new amendment on the ballot that would block most abortions. If passed by the General Assembly, the measure could go to voters as soon as this year.

The proposed amendment would ban abortion except for in medical emergencies, when a fetus has abnormalities, or in cases of rape or incest, with rape or incest cases requiring a police report and subject to a 12-week limit. It would also prohibit public funding for abortions. What’s more, it would ban providing surgeries, hormones or drugs to assist a child with a gender transition, procedures that are already illegal in Missouri.

At a hearing on the proposed amendment before the House Children and Families committee on Tuesday, its sponsor, state Rep. Melanie Stinnett, a Republican from Springfield, acknowledged that some might say she was trying to subvert the people’s will. But Stinnett said she’d heard concerns about the language in Amendment 3 and that this was an attempt to clarify the state’s abortion laws.

Stinnett said voters might not have understood what they were voting for.

Some members of the committee pushed back.

“Did voters know what they were voting for when they voted for you?” asked state Rep. Marlene Terry, a Democrat from the St. Louis suburbs.

The delay in providing abortion access after the election was “a very positive turn of events” that gave conservative legislators time to strategize, state Rep. Brian Seitz, a Republican from Branson, said in an interview. He said it gave his party “time to chip away at certain aspects of Amendment 3.”

Missouri had heavily restricted abortion access long before the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated the federal right to abortion by striking down Roe v. Wade, with the state’s strict regulations leaving only one clinic — Planned Parenthood in St. Louis — operational by 2018. In 2019, the state passed a trigger law that would ban abortion entirely if Roe fell, except in cases of medical emergencies but with no exemptions for rape or incest. That ban took effect in 2022.

Planned Parenthood stopped performing any abortions in Missouri at that time, and many people traveled to neighboring states to access abortions. In 2023, about 2,850 Missourians obtained abortions in Kansas, while about 8,750 sought the procedure in Illinois, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

In response, a massive campaign gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures to put abortion rights on the ballot. Amendment 3 — which established a fundamental right to reproductive freedom, including in making decisions about prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, birth control, abortion care, miscarriage care and respectful birthing conditions — passed by a 51.6% to 48.4% margin.

The amendment guaranteed the right to abortion up to the point of fetal viability, which it defined as the stage at which, in the judgment of a treating physician, a fetus could survive outside the womb without extraordinary medical measures. While the amendment allowed the state legislature to regulate abortion after viability, it required that any such regulations not interfere with abortions necessary to protect the life or health of the pregnant person.

After the amendment took effect in December, Planned Parenthood said it was ready to begin providing abortions at three locations across the state but that it felt limited by Missouri’s ban and other regulations targeting abortion providers, which are designed to make it harder for clinics to operate. It sued.

In December, a state court judge in Kansas City temporarily blocked the ban and most of the rules, including the mandatory 72-hour waiting period and bans based on gestational age. The final outcome will be determined at trial, which is scheduled to begin in January 2026.

The state court ruling left several abortion restrictions in place. Those include strict structural requirements for clinics — such as specific hallway, room and door dimensions — and a mandate that providers perform invasive pelvic exams before prescribing abortion medication.

Abortion rights advocates argue these regulations are medically unnecessary and create barriers to care. At a hearing last week in Kansas City, a lawyer for Planned Parenthood asked the judge to reconsider, emphasizing that the restrictions make it impossible for clinics to resume offering full services.

Planned Parenthood’s lawyer argued that it was because of the licensing requirement that abortion access had been confined to one location in St. Louis in the final years of Roe, and that “such extreme restriction on abortion access is not the result contemplated” by those who voted for the amendment.

The state’s solicitor general, Josh Divine, argued that Planned Parenthood could have requested waivers for the regulations instead of challenging them in court. He noted that the state has granted such waivers in the past, but Planned Parenthood did not submit a request. The judge gave both sides until the end of this week to submit further briefings before her ruling.

The delay has had another effect: fueling division among abortion rights supporters. Some of them opposed Amendment 3, arguing it didn’t go far enough and gave the state too much power to regulate abortion. They note that while the amendment guarantees the right to abortion before fetal viability, it also cements the state’s authority to impose restrictions afterward, giving abortion foes a foothold. (Supporters say they settled on the language as a compromise they believed would appeal to a broad majority of voters, and that an amendment offering unrestricted access to abortion would not have succeeded.)

Representatives for Planned Parenthood did not respond to requests for comment.

The effort to tie abortion to transgender rights mirrors the preelection campaign, where abortion opponents deliberately conflated the two issues on billboards and in radio ads. Critics said this strategy was a distraction — an attempt to shift focus from abortion rights, which had strong voter support, by exploiting voter unease over transgender rights.

Jamille Fields Allsbrook, a professor at Saint Louis University School of Law and a former policy analyst for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, sees Republicans taking a two-pronged approach in response to Missouri’s abortion amendment. With President Donald Trump back in power, she expects them to push familiar strategies, like cutting off Medicaid and Title X funding to clinics that provide abortions.

She said she had expected the Republicans to attack abortion rights in “sneaky, more maneuvering ways” like redefining fetal viability or pushing fetal personhood laws, measures that might sound reasonable to voters but still effectively restrict access.

But she said she was surprised by the Republican effort to simply gut Amendment 3.

“Seems naive politically to try to advance the exact same thing that voters rejected,” she said. “Either they don’t believe that voters have already spoken out loudly and clearly or they think that voters are not smart enough to recognize what they’re trying to do, which is undermine the will of the people.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jeremy Kohler.

In one of his first executive orders after taking office, President Trump ordered the United States to withdraw from the U.N.’s World Health Organization, putting numerous WHO programs at risk, including efforts to tackle tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, says the move is a “grave mistake for American national interests and our national security,” as well as “an attack on science, public health and public health institutions.” He warns that the U.S. will likely fall behind on public health innovation and disease prevention, putting the country and the world at greater risk to “the next pandemic.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

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Early last year, President-elect Donald Trump promised that when he got back into the Oval Office, he’d authorize the U.S. Navy to build more ships. “It’s very important,” he said, “because it’s jobs, great jobs.”

However, the companies that build ships for the government are already having trouble finding enough workers to fill those jobs. And Trump may make it even harder if he follows through on another pledge he’s made: to clamp down on immigration.

The president-elect has told his supporters he would impose new limits on the numbers of immigrants allowed into the country and stage the largest mass deportation campaign in history. Meanwhile the shipbuilding industry, which he also says he supports and which has given significant financial support to Republican causes, is struggling to overcome an acute worker shortage. Immigrants have been critical to helping fill the gaps.

According to a Navy report from last year, several major shipbuilding programs are years behind schedule, owing largely to a lack of workers. The shortfall is so severe that warship production is down to its lowest level in a quarter century.

Shipbuilders and the government have poured millions of dollars into training and recruiting American workers, and, as part of a bipartisan bill just introduced in the Senate, they have proposed to spend even more. Last year the Navy awarded nearly $1 billion in a no-bid contract to a Texas nonprofit to modernize the industry with more advanced technology in a way that will make it more attractive to workers. The nonprofit has already produced splashy TV ads for submarine jobs. One of its goals is to help the submarine industry hire 140,000 new workers in the next 10 years. “We build giants,” one of its ads beckons. “It takes one to build one.”

Still, experts say that these robust efforts have so far resulted in nowhere near enough workers for current needs, let alone a workforce large enough to handle expanded production. “We’re trying to get blood from a turnip,” said Shelby Oakley, an analyst at the Government Accountability Office. “The domestic workforce is just not there.”

In the meantime, the industry is relying on immigrants for a range of shipyard duties, with many working jobs similar to those on a construction site, including on cleanup crews and as welders, painters and pipefitters. And executives worry that any future immigration crackdown or restrictions on legal immigration, including limits on asylum or temporary protected status programs, could cause disruptions that would further harm their capacity for production.

Ron Wille, the president and chief operating officer of All American Marine in Washington state, said that his company was “clawing” for workers. And Peter Duclos, the president of Gladding-Hearn Shipbuilding in Somerset, Massachusetts, said the current immigration system is “so broken” that he was already having trouble holding onto valuable workers and finding more.

There is no publicly available data that shows how much the shipbuilding industry relies on immigrant labor, particularly undocumented immigrant labor. Both Willie and Duclos said that they do not employ undocumented workers, and industry experts say undocumented workers are unlikely to be working on projects requiring security clearances. However, reporting by ProPublica last year found that some shipbuilders with government contracts have used such workers. That reporting focused on a major Louisiana shipyard run by a company called Thoma-Sea, where undocumented immigrants have often been hired through third-party subcontractors.

The story reported on a young undocumented Guatemalan immigrant who was helping build an $89 million U.S. government ship for tracking hurricanes. When he died on the job after working at Thoma-Sea for two years, neither the company nor the subcontractor paid death benefits to his partner and young son.

ProPublica also reported that executives at Thoma-Sea, which declined to comment, had made tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to Republican candidates. However, if Trump’s last time in office is any guide, the shipbuilding industry wouldn’t be exempted from any future crackdown. One of the final workplace raids under Trump’s first administration was conducted at an even larger shipbuilder in Louisiana called Bollinger.

In July 2020, federal immigration agents arrested 19 “unlawfully present foreign nationals” at Bollinger’s Lockport shipyard, according to a story in the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate. Immigration and Customs Enforcement refused to provide information on the raid. According to Bollinger’s website, that yard produces U.S. Coast Guard and Navy patrol boats. Five of the workers arrested were sent to an ICE detention center and 14 were released with pending deportation cases, according to the news report.

Bollinger denied any wrongdoing following the raid. Four years later, there’s no evidence in publicly available federal court records that Bollinger executives faced any charges in connection to it. Meanwhile, federal electoral records show that the company’s executives donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican elected officials last year, including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, both Republicans from Louisiana. The company did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

President Joe Biden’s administration ended workplace raids like the one at Bollinger, saying that it would instead focus on “unscrupulous employers.” Department of Homeland Security officials did not answer questions or provide data on how many employers had been prosecuted since then. However, Trump’s designated “border czar,” Tom Homan, has signaled that the incoming administration will return to carrying out the raids. When asked how the second Trump administration will increase shipbuilding while limiting immigration, a spokesperson for Trump’s transition team only doubled down on the president-elect’s deportation promises, saying they would focus enforcement on “illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers.”

A few days after Trump won the election, a group of undocumented shipyard welders leaving a Hispanic grocery store near the port in Houma, Louisiana, expressed a dim view when asked what they thought lay ahead. One man, who declined to provide his name, broke into a nervous laugh and blurted, “Well, we could be deported.” Another man, a welder from the Mexican state of Coahuila who’d been working in the U.S. for about two years, also declined to give his name but said he worried about losing the life he’d managed to build in this country.

“When they grab you,” he said, “they’ll take you, and you’ll have to leave everything behind.”

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

Do you have information about undocumented immigrants in the workforce? Contact nicole.foy@propublica.org or reach her on Signal 661-549-0572.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Nicole Foy.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Early last year, President-elect Donald Trump promised that when he got back into the Oval Office, he’d authorize the U.S. Navy to build more ships. “It’s very important,” he said, “because it’s jobs, great jobs.”

However, the companies that build ships for the government are already having trouble finding enough workers to fill those jobs. And Trump may make it even harder if he follows through on another pledge he’s made: to clamp down on immigration.

The president-elect has told his supporters he would impose new limits on the numbers of immigrants allowed into the country and stage the largest mass deportation campaign in history. Meanwhile the shipbuilding industry, which he also says he supports and which has given significant financial support to Republican causes, is struggling to overcome an acute worker shortage. Immigrants have been critical to helping fill the gaps.

According to a Navy report from last year, several major shipbuilding programs are years behind schedule, owing largely to a lack of workers. The shortfall is so severe that warship production is down to its lowest level in a quarter century.

Shipbuilders and the government have poured millions of dollars into training and recruiting American workers, and, as part of a bipartisan bill just introduced in the Senate, they have proposed to spend even more. Last year the Navy awarded nearly $1 billion in a no-bid contract to a Texas nonprofit to modernize the industry with more advanced technology in a way that will make it more attractive to workers. The nonprofit has already produced splashy TV ads for submarine jobs. One of its goals is to help the submarine industry hire 140,000 new workers in the next 10 years. “We build giants,” one of its ads beckons. “It takes one to build one.”

Still, experts say that these robust efforts have so far resulted in nowhere near enough workers for current needs, let alone a workforce large enough to handle expanded production. “We’re trying to get blood from a turnip,” said Shelby Oakley, an analyst at the Government Accountability Office. “The domestic workforce is just not there.”

In the meantime, the industry is relying on immigrants for a range of shipyard duties, with many working jobs similar to those on a construction site, including on cleanup crews and as welders, painters and pipefitters. And executives worry that any future immigration crackdown or restrictions on legal immigration, including limits on asylum or temporary protected status programs, could cause disruptions that would further harm their capacity for production.

Ron Wille, the president and chief operating officer of All American Marine in Washington state, said that his company was “clawing” for workers. And Peter Duclos, the president of Gladding-Hearn Shipbuilding in Somerset, Massachusetts, said the current immigration system is “so broken” that he was already having trouble holding onto valuable workers and finding more.

There is no publicly available data that shows how much the shipbuilding industry relies on immigrant labor, particularly undocumented immigrant labor. Both Willie and Duclos said that they do not employ undocumented workers, and industry experts say undocumented workers are unlikely to be working on projects requiring security clearances. However, reporting by ProPublica last year found that some shipbuilders with government contracts have used such workers. That reporting focused on a major Louisiana shipyard run by a company called Thoma-Sea, where undocumented immigrants have often been hired through third-party subcontractors.

The story reported on a young undocumented Guatemalan immigrant who was helping build an $89 million U.S. government ship for tracking hurricanes. When he died on the job after working at Thoma-Sea for two years, neither the company nor the subcontractor paid death benefits to his partner and young son.

ProPublica also reported that executives at Thoma-Sea, which declined to comment, had made tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to Republican candidates. However, if Trump’s last time in office is any guide, the shipbuilding industry wouldn’t be exempted from any future crackdown. One of the final workplace raids under Trump’s first administration was conducted at an even larger shipbuilder in Louisiana called Bollinger.

In July 2020, federal immigration agents arrested 19 “unlawfully present foreign nationals” at Bollinger’s Lockport shipyard, according to a story in the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate. Immigration and Customs Enforcement refused to provide information on the raid. According to Bollinger’s website, that yard produces U.S. Coast Guard and Navy patrol boats. Five of the workers arrested were sent to an ICE detention center and 14 were released with pending deportation cases, according to the news report.

Bollinger denied any wrongdoing following the raid. Four years later, there’s no evidence in publicly available federal court records that Bollinger executives faced any charges in connection to it. Meanwhile, federal electoral records show that the company’s executives donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican elected officials last year, including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, both Republicans from Louisiana. The company did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

President Joe Biden’s administration ended workplace raids like the one at Bollinger, saying that it would instead focus on “unscrupulous employers.” Department of Homeland Security officials did not answer questions or provide data on how many employers had been prosecuted since then. However, Trump’s designated “border czar,” Tom Homan, has signaled that the incoming administration will return to carrying out the raids. When asked how the second Trump administration will increase shipbuilding while limiting immigration, a spokesperson for Trump’s transition team only doubled down on the president-elect’s deportation promises, saying they would focus enforcement on “illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers.”

A few days after Trump won the election, a group of undocumented shipyard welders leaving a Hispanic grocery store near the port in Houma, Louisiana, expressed a dim view when asked what they thought lay ahead. One man, who declined to provide his name, broke into a nervous laugh and blurted, “Well, we could be deported.” Another man, a welder from the Mexican state of Coahuila who’d been working in the U.S. for about two years, also declined to give his name but said he worried about losing the life he’d managed to build in this country.

“When they grab you,” he said, “they’ll take you, and you’ll have to leave everything behind.”

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

Do you have information about undocumented immigrants in the workforce? Contact nicole.foy@propublica.org or reach her on Signal 661-549-0572.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Nicole Foy.

Santa Claus decorations, Christmas trees and other decorations were clearly on display in Shanghai malls on Dec. 24, with some shoppers soaking up the festive atmosphere, local residents said.

“This year’s atmosphere is one of the best in recent years,” a Shanghai resident who gave only the surname Sun for fear of reprisals told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview. “Xintiandi and other places have a lot of Christmas decorations, so we went to see them.”

“Some social media accounts are also publicizing which places have better Christmas trees or decorations, or where there are Christmas markets,” he said, speculating that the government has relaxed regulations in commercial centers for fear of alienating foreign investors.

The apparent relaxation comes after several years of a nationwide crackdown by ruling Communist Party on Christian worship, as well as public Christmas decorations and events.

(Josh Arslan, Tingshu Wang, Tingshu Wang/Reuters)

However, monasteries, temples, mosques, churches and other religious activity venues in China are still required to support the leadership of the Communist Party and leader Xi Jinping’s “sinicization” program for all kinds of religious activity.

That’s included the hanging of portraits of Xi Jinping in churches, a ban on Christmas celebrations and enforced demolition work at major mosques and churches to remove domes and crosses.

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A brief online search found a holiday shopping promotional event titled “Celebrating Christmas and New Year’s Day Together,” on Sina.com, while the WeChat social media platform saw advertisements for Christmas-themed events.

State-run English-language newspaper the China Daily even ran a cartoon featuring Santa Claus on Dec. 23.

“We used to see a lot of posts about boycotting foreign festivals around this time of year, ... but suddenly nobody cares about this any more,” a resident of Guangzhou who gave only the surname Wu for fear of reprisals told RFA Mandarin.

“The government probably hasn’t given them any direction on the matter, so the pro-government 50-cent army and little pinks may not be interested any more,” he said.

Pledge to ‘resist Western holidays’

The authorities are still cracking down on Christmas among children and young people, however.

Authorities at a secondary school in the central province of Hubei sent out a pledge to students warning them off the practice.

“Please don’t send me greetings on Western holidays,” the pledge said. “I’m not Christian; I’m Chinese. I’m not a citizen of the West, so why should I celebrate Western holidays?”

(Josh Arslan/Reuters)

The statement called on students to “consciously resist Western holidays,” and banned them from exchanging Christmas gifts.

In the eastern province of Anhui, the Lingbi County No. 4 High School also issued a statement to students and teachers, banning Christmas decorations in public.

“It is strictly forbidden to display any Christmas-related content in public places such as classrooms,” the notice said. “Do not imitate or flatter foreigners, do not organize or participate in Christmas-related gatherings, and do not forward foreign holiday content.”

It said teachers and students should “understand and identify with the spiritual connotation of Chinese traditional virtues and culture, and practice the core values ​​of socialism.”

And Hanzhong City No. 4 High School in the northern province of Shaanxi said students are banned from any Christmas-related activities, including bringing wrapping paper, snow spray or other Christmas-related items into school, on pain of “severe punishment.”

“This is to guide students to cherish their own culture, and to enhance national confidence and cultural identity,” the directive said.

Limited services

Meanwhile, a Christian who gave only the surname Zhao for fear of reprisals said he was permitted to go to a Christmas service on Wednesday, but only for an hour.

“I’m in Jiangsu [province] right now, and you have to give your name to get into the church, and the services are limited to not much more than one hour,” he said.

“This year is a little more relaxed, but in Anhui, you also have to give your name to get into the church,” Zhao said.

(Tingshu Wang, Josh Arslan/Reuters)

Under President Xi Jinping’s “sinicization” policy, the government is particularly strict about banning religious activities for young people under the age of 18, he said.

“Education starts from an early age,” he said. “They think it’s harder to change people’s minds if they have been Christians since they were young.”

In the southwestern province of Yunnan, the National Primary School in Luquan county called on students to “take a rational look at Western festivals and culture, and don’t worship foreign things blindly or follow trends.”

Student are banned from “celebrating Christmas, buying gifts and forwarding related content” on social media, it said.

Similar warnings were issued in some companies, who banned employees from forwarding Christmas-related content on social media.

“Employee behavior should be consistent with company culture, and support their Chinese cultural heritage through their actions,” a decoration company in Dongying city told employees.

A Protestant pastor of a church in the port city of Qingdao who gave only the surname Qin for fear of reprisals confirmed that some shopping malls where he lives are displaying Christmas decorations.

“But you couldn’t hear any Christmas carols in the mall,” Qin said. “The malls used to play Christmas carols, including songs in English praising Jesus and the coming of Christ, but I didn’t hear any this year.”

Meanwhile, security guards and local religious affairs bureau officials are sitting in at the local church over the holiday period, Qin said.

U.S.-based current affairs commentator Tang Jingyuan said the ruling Chinese Communist Party uses “cultural confidence” as a way to reject what it sees as “Western” values, particularly when connected to human rights.

“The real meaning of this so-called self-confidence is the defense of the Chinese Communist Party’s own totalitarian and distorted red ideology,” he said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Qian Lang and Kitty Wang for RFA Mandarin.

The New Zealand government coalition is tweaking university regulations to curb what it says is an increasingly “risk-averse approach” to free speech.

The proposed changes will set clear expectations on how universities should approach freedom of speech issues.

Each university will then have to adopt a “freedom of speech statement” consistent with the central government’s expectations.

• READ MORE: Other academic freedom reports

The changes will also prohibit tertiary institutions from adopting positions on issues that do not relate to their core functions.

Associate Education Minister David Seymour said fostering students’ ability to debate ideas is an essential part of universities’ educational mission.

“Despite being required by the Education Act and the Bill of Rights Act to uphold academic freedom and freedom of expression, there is a growing trend of universities deplatforming speakers and cancelling events where they might be perceived as controversial or offensive,” he said.

“That’s why the National/ACT coalition agreement committed to introduce protections for academic freedom and freedom of speech to ensure universities perform their role as the critic and conscience of society.”

Minister for Tertiary Education and Skills Penny Simmonds said freedom of speech was fundamental to the concept of academic freedom.

“Universities should promote diversity of opinion and encourage students to explore new ideas and perspectives. This includes enabling them to hear from invited speakers with a range of viewpoints.”

It is expected the changes will take effect by the end of next year, after which universities will have six months to develop a statement and get it approved.

Aside from the fact that the free speech legislation for universities is a waste of time (and seemingly ideologically inconsistent with the anti-regulation stance of the government), this line from the RNZ article is both hilarious and worrying pic.twitter.com/aOoPa0ZPc5

— Quintin Jane (@RealQuintinJane) December 19, 2024

Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington said the important issue of free speech had been a dominant topic throughout the year.

It believed a policy it had come up with would align with the intent of the criteria laid out by the government today.

However, the Greens are among critics, saying the government’s changes will add fuel to the political fires of disinformation, and put teachers and students in the firing line.

Labour says universities should be left to make decisions on free speech themselves.

‘A heavy-handed approach’
The Tertiary Education Union (TEU) said proposed rules could do more harm than good.

They have been been welcomed by the Free Speech Union, which said academic freedom was “under threat”, but the TEU said there was no problem to solve.

TEU president Sandra Grey said the move seemed to be aimed at ensuring people could spread disinformation on university campuses.

“I think one of the major concerns is that you might get universities opening up the space that is for academic and rigorous debate and saying it’s okay we can have climate deniers, we can have people who believe in creationism coming into our campuses and speaking about it as though it were scientific, as though it was rigorously defendable when in fact we know some of these questions . . .  have been settled,” she said.

Grey said academics who expressed views on campus could expect them to be debated, but that was part and parcel of working at a university and not an attack on their freedom of speech.

“There isn’t actually a problem. I do think universities, all the staff who work there, the students, understand that they’re covered by all of their requirements for freedom of speech that other citizens are.

“So it feels like we’ve got a heavy-handed approach from a government that apparently is anti-regulation but is now going to put in place the whole lot of requirements on a community that just doesn’t need it.”

Some topics ‘suppressed’

Free Speech Union chief executive Jonathan Ayling said freedom of speech was under threat in universities.

“We’ve supported academics . . .  where they feel that they have been unfairly disadvantaged simply for holding a different opinion to some of their peers. Of course, that is also an addition to the explicit calls for people to be cancelled, to be unemployed,” he said.

Ayling said some academics were afraid to express their views and there was also a problem with “compelled speech”.

“Forcing certain references on particularly ideological issues. There’s questions around race, gender, international conflicts, covid-19, these are all questions that we’ve found have been suppressed and also there’s the aspect of self-censorship,” he said.

“As we have and alongside partners looked into this more and more, it seems that many people in the academy exist in a culture of fear.”

University committed to differing viewpoints
Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington is committed to hearing a range of different viewpoints on its campuses, vice-chancellor Professor Nic Smith says.

Free speech had been an important issue during 2024, and the university had arrived at a policy that covered both freedom of speech and academic freedom.

By consulting widely, there was now a shared understanding of “foundational principles”, and its policy would be in place early in the new year.

“We believe this policy aligns with the intent of the criteria [from the government] as we understand them. It recognises the strength of our diverse university community and affirms that this diversity makes us stronger,” Professor Smith said.

“At the same time, it acknowledges that within any diverse community, individuals will inevitably encounter ideas they disagree with-sometimes strongly.

“Finding value in these disagreements is something universities are very good at: listening to different points of view in the spirit of advancing understanding and learning that can ultimately help us live and work better together.”

The university believed in hearing a range of views from staff, rather than adopting a single institutional position.

“The only exception to this principle is on matters that directly affect our core functions as a university.”

‘Stoking fear and division’

Green Party’s spokesperson for Tertiary Education, Francisco Hernadez, said the new policy had nothing to do with free speech.

“This is about polluting our public discourse for political gain.”

Universities played a critical role, providing a platform for informed and reasoned debate.

“Our universities should be able to decide who is given a platform on their campuses, not David Seymour. These changes risk turning our universities into hostile environments unsafe for marginalised communities.

“Misinformation, disinformation, and rhetoric that inflames hatred towards certain groups has no place in our society, let alone our universities. Freedom of speech is fundamental, but it is not a licence to harm.”

Hernandez said universities should be trusted to ensure the balance was struck between academic freedom and a duty of care.

“Today’s announcement has also come with a high dose of unintended irony.

“David Seymour is speaking out of both sides of his mouth by on the one hand claiming to support freedom of speech, but on the other looking to limit the ability universities have to take stances on issues, like the war in Gaza for example.

“This is an Orwellian attempt to limit discourse to the confines of the government’s agenda. This is about stoking fear and division for political gain.”

Labour’s Associate Education (Tertiary) spokesperson Deborah Russell responded: “One of the core legislated functions of universities in this country is to be a critic and conscience of society. That means continuing to speak truth to power, even if those in power don’t like it.”

“Nowhere should be a platform for hate speech. I am certain universities can make these decisions themselves.”

‘Expectations clarified’ – university
The University of Auckland said in a statement the announcement of planned legislation changes would help “to clarify government expectations in this area”.

“The university has a longstanding commitment to maintaining freedom of expression and academic freedom on our campuses, and in recent years has worked closely with [the university’s] senate and council to review, revise and consult on an updated Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom Policy.

“This is expected to return to senate and council for further discussion in early 2025 and will take into account the proposed new legislation.”

The university described the nature of the work as “complex”.

“While New Zealand universities have obligations under law to protect freedom of expression, academic freedom and their role as ‘critic and conscience of society’, as the proposed legislation appreciates, this is balanced against other important policies and codes.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

It might seem obvious that making a neighborhood more friendly to pedestrians encourages people to walk more, improving public health and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from driving. But it’s surprisingly tricky to demonstrate that with data, since other factors influence how much a person walks, like their socioeconomic status. Cities need such data to prioritize which neighborhoods to make more walkable, and then public health officials need still more research to confirm the benefits of any interventions. 

To that end, a new study in the American Journal of Epidemiology used 11,000 twins to show that whenever a neighborhood becomes 1 percent more walkable — by, for instance, adding sidewalks to make it easier for people to get from parks to restaurants and other businesses on foot — residents walk 0.42 percent more minutes a week. So if a city boosts an area’s walkability by about 50 percent, an average resident might theoretically walk about 20 more minutes a week, according to the study. That’s important, the researchers write, “because even small increases in physical activity at the population level can contribute to improvements in public health.” (You can find the walkability score of your neighborhood here. The service is separate from the study.) 

Experts have long encouraged people to walk for their health. But by targeting walkability overall, cities can bake that encouragement into the landscape itself. “Individual behavior change just isn’t doing it. We’ve kind of done that to death, in my opinion,” said Glen E. Duncan, the lead author of the paper and a professor of nutrition and exercise physiology at Washington State University. “We just tell people to eat your fruits and vegetables and get more exercise, without really thinking about the larger structural problems that hinder people from eating better and getting more activity.”

A key component of the study was a database of twins, which allowed the researchers to look at pairs of similar people living in different neighborhoods. The researchers could investigate the objective measurements of walkability in the twins’ neighborhoods — such as plenty of destinations readily accessible by sidewalks — to determine if the built environment influenced their activity. They found that the twins who lived in more walkable neighborhoods reported walking more weekly minutes than their siblings. Now policymakers can use this information to make their cities more walkable, Duncan said. “That could be a really good thing for public health.”

The study could help city governments looking to take climate action, too. Cities are prime candidates for “multisolving” techniques,  interventions that solve multiple problems at once. New sidewalks or zoning laws to get more businesses within walking distance for residents don’t just make it easier to get around on foot. “Every trip taken on foot instead of by a fossil fuel-powered car reduces greenhouse gas emissions,” said Elizabeth Sawin, the director of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Multisolving Institute, who wasn’t involved in the new research. “Walkability also helps connect people with the neighbors and local businesses, and increases a sense of connection and economic vitality.”

With more people opting to walk instead of drive, fewer cars on the road would improve local air quality and put fewer pedestrians and cyclists in danger of getting run over by cars: Every day in the U.S., an average of 20 people are killed by motor vehicles. But it’s not necessary to close off roads to cars to make a place more walkable; a city government simply needs to improve the existing infrastructure to make people feel safer walking and cycling. That might be particularly welcome in underserved neighborhoods. “I think it is going to make a world of a difference for many people — marginalized groups in particular,” said Bunmi Akinnusotu, director of city innovation at the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Aspen Institute, who wasn’t involved in the research.

Cities can change more readily than you might think. San Francisco voters ended up closing that coastal highway in the November election, clearing the way for it to become a two-mile-long park for pedestrians and bicyclists. And ever since the lifting of COVID restrictions, cities across the U.S. have been experimenting with slow streets and other ways to improve pedestrian safety and human health. “If we really want to move the needle on public health,” Duncan said, “we need to be thinking about things that we can change that impact a large percentage of the population.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A study of 11,000 twins shows how to make America walkable again on Dec 19, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

Janine Jackson interviewed Good Jobs First’s Arlene Martinez about Amazon‘s subsidized misconduct for the December 6, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Jeff Bezos (CC photo: Daniel Oberhaus)

Janine Jackson: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” So wrote Upton Sinclair in 1934. It’s hard not to think about that as we see corporate news media report on Amazon, whose leader is, of course, the owner of the Washington Post, but whose influence as retailer, landowner, policy shaper is multi-tentacled in ways you and I probably don’t even know.

That outsized, multi-front power is behind the resistance to Amazon, the urgent need to illuminate what a private company on this scale can do in the country and the world’s political, consumer, regulatory, labor ecosphere, and what needs to happen to address that power.

Arlene Martinez is deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Arlene Martinez.

Arlene Martinez: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Good Jobs First (11/29/24)

JJ: You wrote recently, with colleagues, that the #MakeAmazonPay campaign was about calling attention to Amazon‘s

mistreatment of workers, disregard for consumers whose data it misuses, bullying of small local businesses and accelerating climate destruction, especially during the holiday shopping season.

That’s before we get to how we the people enable all of that through government subsidies, which we will talk about.

But first, let’s talk about some of the documented complaints and concerns about Amazon‘s day-to-day practices, the way they operate. Because it’s not about “hating them because they’re beautiful.” It’s not about jealousy because they built a better mousetrap. This is concern about things that just shouldn’t happen, period, right?

The Nation (5/2/24)

AM: That’s right. And I really liked the way that you opened up our conversation here, because it’s really hard to overstate just how powerful Jeff Bezos is, and how many areas Amazon is in, and the way that they run their business across all the different areas that they touch, how harmful it is, whether you’re talking about the environment, and all the data centers that they’re building as they capitalize on AI, artificial intelligence. Or the way that they are so punishing to workers that the injury rate is several times that of any other warehouse company. How they drive down wages wherever they locate. How they squeeze small businesses; a report from the Institute of Local Self-Reliance found that 45 cents of every dollar that a business made selling on the Amazon platform went to Amazon.

So I could just go on and on, but there are so many ways that Amazon harms the entire ecosystem of business worldwide. And one of the worst parts about it, and there are a lot of bad parts about it, is that we are subsidizing that, because communities are giving Amazon billions of dollars in direct cash payments. They don’t have to pay their taxes, or they’re given straight cash, or reduced land, whatever the case may be. And that doesn’t even begin to include the procurement and other public contracting money that they received. I’ll open there.

JJ: Well, and I want to get into that. I think for many folks, maybe they’ve heard about workers being cheated out of wages, but that is so crucial to the subsidy conversation. But let’s start with the fact that we do have evidence that Amazon is under-serving their workers, not just in terms of wages, but also in terms of health and safety, and what do we know about that?

Good Jobs First: Violation Tracker

AM: We run a database called Violation Tracker, where we look at over 450 regulatory agencies that we get data from, so we can begin to see part of Amazon‘s behavior toward its workers. We capture how much money Amazon has stolen from its workers, in the form of wages, and we also look at some health and safety violations.

One of the reasons that Amazon‘s dollar total is so much lower than, for example, Bank of America, which has billions and billions and billions of dollars in penalties and fines—Amazon‘s comparative total is so much lower because the federal agencies that are in charge of protecting workers only have the authority to give thousands of dollars in fines, versus a regulatory agency that oversees banks that can give billion dollars in fines in one single case. So what we see is, as bad as Amazon‘s record is, and it is bad, it would be worse if we treated workers with the same care and with the same concern that we do as investors who got cheated on an investment.

JJ: That’s so deep, because it speaks to, like, folks might want to get mad at a corporation, like Amazon, but then you also have to understand the weakening of the regulatory agencies that are meant to be addressing that. It’s not as simple as one might hope it would be. And folks have heard, for example, on this show, talking about the IRS saying, “We understand that rich people cheat more on their taxes than poor people, but it’s easier for us to go after poor people, because it’s much simpler.” And so a company like Amazon can just make things so complex, in a regulatory framework, that it’s very hard to address the harm that they’re doing. It’s kind of a big-picture problem.

Arlene Martinez: “So many of the issues with Amazon, and the reason that Amazon exists in the first place, is because we’ve lacked a lot of the regulatory mechanisms to contain it from ever becoming this big.”

AM: Yeah, that’s right. So many of the issues with Amazon, and the reason that Amazon exists in the first place, is because we’ve lacked a lot of the regulatory mechanisms to contain it from ever becoming this big. If, for example, some of the antitrust legislation had been implemented and upheld, Amazon never might have been able to grow to this size. That’s why it’s been so promising in recent years to see the FTC and Lina Khan really take on corporate giants like Amazon, which have essentially become monopolies and dominate entire spaces. So it really is a big structural issue.

I get asked a lot about, should people just not shop on Amazon? Well, that would be nice. I mean, I don’t shop on Amazon, but that isn’t the answer. Like I said, it would be nice, but the answer is really these structural problems that enabled Amazon to get so big in the first place. And these regulatory agencies need to flex their muscle to make sure that Amazon is broken up, or contained, or not allowed to dominate entire industries and sectors the way that it is.

And you’ve probably seen it’s moving into even more areas. Now it’s going into chips, and now it’s going into pharmacies and healthcare. And its goal is to dominate the world, and it’s headed there without some proper agency there flexing their muscle to rein it in.

JJ: I wanted to pull you out on one question, which is data centers, which is, we hear, and folks at the local media level may hear, Amazon‘s coming in, and they’re going to locate here, and that’s going to provide jobs. And sometimes what they’re talking about is data centers. Why don’t data centers equal jobs? Can you talk a little bit about that?

ProPublica (8/4/24)

AM: Data centers are essentially huge warehouses that just store big, basically, server farms. They’re just running data all the time, and there’s very few people that are needed to actually staff these facilities. So they don’t create many jobs, because there aren’t many functions that are required as part of these data centers. I mean, there’s the construction phase, and then a few dozen people that are needed to staff them.

And yet they’re getting what’s often several million dollars per job. We did a study in 2016 that looked at the average for the Apples, the Googles, the Amazons, the Metas, was about $2 million per job. But we’ve seen a lot of cases now where it’s a lot higher per job, and a community can never make that money back.

But I think the other question, too, and I think what gets missing from a lot of stories that I see about data centers, is why data centers are getting subsidized in the first place. When you think about what an incentive was supposed to even do in the first place, it was to spur something to happen that wouldn’t otherwise happen.

We know that AI is the future. These companies are racing to build data centers, because they have to, to remain competitive. So there is absolutely no business case to be subsidizing companies to build a data center, especially considering the low job return.

Nonprofit Quarterly (8/7/24)

JJ: In this deep piece about corporate government giveaways, you cite Neil deMause, who is a FAIR favorite, who, with Joanna Cagan, wrote Field of Schemes about subsidizing sports teams’ building of new arenas, and it’s kind of a familiar template, where folks say we’re going to bring in profit, and yet it’s something that would happen anyway. There’s kind of a—it’s not even a bait and switch, it’s just misinformation that is put forward to cities, when something like a sports team, or something like an Amazon, says, “We’re going to bring a lot of stuff to your community, and therefore you should subsidize our taxes.”

And some of us are like: “Well, wait, you’re a business. You’re going to make a profit here. Why would we subsidize it?” There’s kind of a big-picture misunderstanding here.

AM: Yeah, and part of it is that it just becomes irresistible for a lot of politicians to have the opportunity to stand next to a Jeff Bezos, or some other high-ranking official, or a billionaire owner of a sports team. And then you have access to these box-level seats that you couldn’t afford on your own. And all of that is really irresistible. So there’s really a very human element to giving subsidies that are proven to not drive economic development, like a stadium, which study after study has shown does nothing to improve the lives of residents in that community, but it just becomes very irresistible.

And I think on a local level, too, with someone—I was a reporter for many years, covering a lot of city council meetings and school board meetings, and knowing that these council members, most of them who are part-time, get a few hundred dollars a month in pay, they want to do good for their community, and they think bringing in an Amazon is a good move for their community, without realizing what they’re really doing is bringing in a company that hurts their workers, pays them very little and damages their existing small businesses in their community. But they’re thinking they’re doing a good thing.

JJ: Well, and part of it is a kind of numerical thing where media talk about, “Well, these folks will pay this money in taxes,” and that makes it sound like it’s a profit. There’s kind of a basic math problem that sometimes happens here. When you talk about tax breaks to be given to whatever entity, media can sometimes present that as though that’s money that’s going into the tax coffers, which is not what’s happening.

Nonprofit Quarterly (8/3/22)

AM: That’s right. I mean, there’s a lot of companies that really profit based on the size of the incentive. There are a lot of site location consultants, for example. The bigger the subsidy, the more their percentages. So their drive is to get the biggest subsidy possible, even though it isn’t in the best interest of their community.

JJ: Subsidies are sold to communities as profit, as though it’s going to be money, somehow, that’s going to go right into the community, when that’s not the way it plays out.

AM: Yes, and this is a big issue in our space, in terms of the media coverage that we often see. It’s because you get what are called “economic impact reports,” and I say “economic impact” in quotes because it isn’t actual economic impact, and it’s nowhere close to being a cost/benefit analysis. What it does is it takes this big, big smorgasbord of everything, every dollar that’s spent on construction phase, or supply chain, or the entire salary sometimes of a worker is included in this economic impact report. And a lot of times you have no idea what’s actually in there, because the people who produced it say it’s proprietary, and they won’t give it to the public.

And a lot of times, those people that are hired to produce the economic impact report, and we see this a lot in the stadium space, are people who are working for the team owners, or who are working for Amazon, they will be the ones producing these economic impact reports. So you have a real conflict of interest that I think is missed sometimes in the reporting, and just makes these studies bogus.

When I talk to reporters about how to cover and report on economic development incentives, I tell them to ask for everything that went into that economic impact report. And if they don’t release it, then don’t include their numbers, and say that they won’t give it to you.

JJ: That gets right to the point of transparency, which I just wanted to ask you about. I think that, whether you understand an issue or don’t, transparency about what’s happening ought to be ground zero. And yet that is difficult to get from some corporations, and also from some government agencies. But journalists should have that as a basic fundamental.

AM: Yes. And we also run these databases called Amazon Tracker and Subsidy Tracker, and both of them look at companies that have received subsidies. And you’ll see, among Amazon subsidies, and also Subsidy Tracker, which is broader, you’ll see a lot of entries that say “undisclosed,” because even though a company is getting public money, they’re not releasing the value of that subsidy. Reporters should insist on that, and make it really clear in stories when they’re not getting it.

Real News Network (7/22/23)

JJ: And I’ll end on that. But I will say that, obviously, I’m angry about media for my job, but it’s not that they don’t do critical stories sometimes; it’s this connecting of the dots. So when I see a storyline that says that Amazon or Walmart is a “successful business,” and then I see another story that says, oh yeah, a lot of their workers still need to rely on public assistance to not starve. But then on the other page, I’m still reading Amazon as a “successful business.” So I feel like at a certain point, it’s not about there’s never any good stories or critical stories. It’s about a failure to connect the dots, to say, “What does it mean for a company to be ‘successful’ right now, and what harm is required to get to that?”

AM: Those are all such great points, and it’s true that we have seen a lot of really amazing reporting around Amazon, and Bloomberg is the outlet that reported about how Amazon was driving down wages in the warehouse sector, because they took an industry-wide look, and were able to see that anytime Amazon entered a community, wages dropped for the entire sector, including non-Amazon workers.

And the Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania, wrote one of the first stories, 12 years ago, to report on ambulances being placed outside of Amazon warehouses, rather than Amazon investing in air conditioning and heating for their workers. So they were getting ill from heat exhaustion.

So there has been a lot of amazing reporting, but I think you’re right in connecting all those dots, it’s very hard to see. And when Amazon releases a press release about how they gave a $500,000 loan, reporters repeat that as if it’s some gift, even though it might not include the fact that Amazon got a billion dollars in that same community as a subsidy. So it is a mixed bag.

JJ: I appreciate the bright critical spots. I’m upset about the fact that it doesn’t seem to get stirred into an understanding of what we, as a democratic society, should ask from corporations, and why do we call a company “successful” whose workers need to rely on public assistance? There’s some kind of connected story that’s not happening there.

ProMarket (5/30/17)

AM: I’ll just add, I remember as a reporter—and I was a reporter for many years—I was very fixated on holding government accountable. Really felt like that was a big role of mine, and I spent a lot less energy thinking about holding corporations accountable. And now that I’ve left the space, and I’m in this nonprofit watchdog space, and a lot of my work involves corporate governance, and overseeing their practices, I really see those gaps even more stark, and how, in general, I think journalists don’t do the best job about covering companies, and we could do a lot better, which is why I think shows like yours are so helpful, why I hope organizations like ours are useful, so that we start putting the same kind of scrutiny on corporations that we have long done on governments.

JJ: I will just add, we hope for journalists to look to see critically powerful actors, and those powerful actors are in corporations, and they’re in government. And then here’s us, we the people, and that’s where we would look for journalists to look out for the public interest, however that is affected by whatever forces are in power, and that’s why I appreciate your work.

AM: Thank you so much.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Arlene Martinez. She’s deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First. You can find their extensive work on Amazon and other corporate and government accountability on GoodJobsFirst.org. Arlene Martinez, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AM: Thanks for having me, and thanks for your work.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Next year, Donald Trump will have the chance to reshape the American public health system with his nomination of anti-vaccine crusader Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary for health and human services. While corporate media haven’t necessarily endorsed this choice, many commentators have worked hard to downplay the danger Kennedy poses to the US public.

Dr. Rachael Bedard (New York Times, 11/15/24) says of Robert Kennedy Jr., “We can’t spend four years simply fighting his agenda.”

On one of the most influential platforms, the New York Times op-ed page (11/15/24), geriatric physician Rachael Bedard wrote that Kennedy has “seeds of truth” in his agenda: “There’s a health care agenda that finds common ground between people like myself—medical researchers and clinicians—and Mr. Kennedy.”

We shouldn’t fret too much about RFK Jr.’s vaccine positions, Bedard assured us, because “Mr. Kennedy’s skepticism on this topic may counterintuitively be an advantage.” His “statements on vaccinations are more complex than they’re often caricatured to be,” she insisted. “He’s said he was not categorically opposed to them or, as an official in the new Trump administration, planning to pull them from the market.”

Similarly, physician and media personality Drew Pinsky, aka Dr. Drew, downplayed Kennedy’s anti-vaccine stance in The Hill (11/25/24):

I know Bobby Kennedy—I’ve had him on my show—and I have talked at length with him about these issues. Kennedy isn’t a vaccine-denier or a vaccine conspiracy theorist…. Kennedy isn’t attempting to deny access to vaccines to anyone.

In Newsweek (11/27/24), Brandon Novick of the Center for Economic and Policy Research acknowledged “legitimate concern about his vaccine skepticism” but went on to argue that those concerns are “overblown”: “He promises not to prevent Americans from accessing any vaccine,” Novick wrote. “Kennedy mainly wants to require more and higher quality studies of vaccine safety and increase transparency.”

‘Better not get them vaccinated’

Seth Mnookin (Scientific American, 1/11/17): “For more than a decade, Kennedy has promoted anti-vaccine propaganda completely unconnected to reality.”

A review of RFK Jr.’s record by the AP (7/31/23) clearly documents that he opposes vaccines generally, especially when talking to right-wing audiences: “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated,” he told a podcast in 2021. (He also said, in 2023, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective,” but claims the podcaster cut him off before he could say something…more complex.) He has also peddled the discredited theory that vaccines cause autism (Scientific American, 1/11/17).

Of course, his dangerous anti-science views go far beyond vaccines. The Autistic Self Advocacy Network (11/22/24) laid out the extent of Kennedy’s maddening ideas:

His opposition to life-saving vaccines, his belief that HIV may not cause AIDS, his desire to increase the use of quack autism “treatments,” and his comments about putting people taking psychiatric medication in labor camps should all be immediately disqualifying. Autistic people, the disability community and the nation’s public health will all suffer if he is confirmed.

Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association (11/18/24), sees a direct threat public health under Kennedy:

Unfortunately, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has demonstrated a consistent lack of willingness to listen, learn and act in the best interest of the health of the American people. He was identified in 2021 as a member of the “Disinformation Dozen” that produced 65% of the shares of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms that contributed to the public’s mistrust in science, and likely led to morbidity and mortality.

Nowhere do Bedard, Pinksy or Novick take any of this into account when categorizing Kennedy’s views on vaccines as “more complex” or “overblown.” Unmentioned in all three pieces, for example, is that Kennedy and his anti-vax nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, helped spread misinformation in American Samoa, where vaccination rates plummeted and a measles outbreak subsequently killed dozens of children (Mother Jones, 7/2/24). Derek Lowe of Science (8/28/24) wrote: “As far as I’m concerned, he and Children’s Health Defense have blood on their hands.”

And Novick’s blithe dismissal of health experts’ concerns misrepresents Kennedy’s promise: He did not promise “not to prevent Americans from accessing any vaccine”; he promised not to “take away anybody’s vaccines.” It’s a crucial distinction. Banning vaccines would actually be fairly difficult for a health secretary to do by fiat, so it’s an easy promise to make. But many rightly fear he would work to make vaccines less accessible—not by “pulling them from the market,” as Bedard assures readers he won’t do, but by, for instance, making decisions that would mean vaccines would in many cases no longer be covered by insurance.

And by changing vaccination recommendations, Kennedy could strongly influence vaccination rates, which would increase the possibility of deadly disease outbreaks impacting far more people than only those able to choose whether they want to be vaccinated—again, whether or not he “takes away anybody’s vaccines.”

‘Best chance of reining in corruption’

Brandon Novick (Newsweek, 11/27/24): “Kennedy represents a unique shift away from the corporate capture that has pervaded the public health agencies.”

Many of these corporate media pieces try to frame Kennedy’s position as populist outrage against the status quo, portraying Kennedy as some anti-corporate crusader  looking out for regular folks against parasitic healthcare profiteers.

Novick wrote:

Within the context of a Trump administration, Americans should strongly support Kennedy’s nomination as he is the best chance of reining in corruption and corporate power while prioritizing public health over profits.

“Kennedy has railed against price gouging, and he supports the ability for Medicare to negotiate drug prices like other nations who pay far less,” he argued. Novick added that Kennedy “seeks to stop the pervasive poisoning of Americans by large drug and food companies,” and points “to European nations which have stronger regulations.”

It’s hard to imagine the Trump White House, dedicated to destroying the administrative state, creating more federal regulations on commerce. As Greg Sargent (New Republic, 11/15/24) noted, Trump

didn’t disguise his promises to govern in the direct interests of some of the wealthiest executives and investors in the country…. Trump is basically declaring that his administration will be open for business to those who boost and assist him politically.

The notion that you can pick through an agenda like Kennedy’s and join with him on just the sensible parts is a fundamental misunderstanding of how right-wing “populism” works. Its very purpose is to deflect legitimate concerns and grievances onto imaginary conspiracies and scapegoats, in order to neutralize struggles for real change.

When the far right talks about genuine problems, your response should not be, we can work together because we share the same issues. Those issues are just the bait that’s necessary for the switch.

‘Casualty of the culture wars’

Laurie Ochoa (LA Times, 11/23/24): “Many in the food community would love to see someone break the status quo.”

But this is a mistake that commentators, eager for compromise and common ground, make again and again. Asking if there’s a “silver lining” to RFK Jr.’s appointment, Laurie Ochoa at the LA Times (11/23/24) said that while scrutiny has

rightly been on [Kennedy’s] anti-vaccine and anti-fluoride positions, some have taken note of his strong language against food additives in the processed foods so many of us consume and that are making so many Americans sick.

Houston Chronicle (11/22/24) editorial writer Regina Lankenau used her column space to ask Jerold Mande, an adjunct professor of nutrition at Harvard University, “So is there any chance that RFK Jr. under a Trump administration will be the one to disrupt Big Food?” He answered, “Yes, and I’m hopeful,” saying that Kennedy’s potential oversight of “federal nutrition programs, including school meal programs” could help him tackle processed food intake.

At the Boston Globe (11/20/24), Jennifer Block argued that “When It Comes to Food, RFK and the ‘Make America Healthy Again’ Crew Have a Point.” Block touted the right-wing pseudo-science “wellness” panel that launched the MAHA movement, writing that while it’s true that Biden-Harris have done much more for public health than Trump did in terms of nutrition and regulation of the food industry, “Yet the community voicing concerns about food and contaminants—like the people who showed up at Vani Hari’s rally in Michigan — feel as if they’ve gotten a warmer reception on the political right.”

Her evidence is that Democrats and the left have been critical of the pseudo-science wellness crowd. “But it would be a grave mistake if necessary conversations about chronic illness and our medical and food systems became another casualty of the culture wars,” she wrote.

The medical world just isn’t being open-minded enough, she wrote, arguing that the “debunkers’ credo is that anyone who’s critical of medicine or offers alternatives to pharmaceuticals will send you on a slippery slope to anti-vaccine, anti-science woo.” The problem, of course, is not that Kennedy is at the top of that slope, but that he’s already at the bottom of the hill.

‘A national disgrace’

Neil Barsky (Guardian, 11/21/24): “Should RFK Jr. be able to abandon his numerous conspiracy theories about vaccines, he can be the most transformative health secretary in our country’s history.”

Neil Barsky, founder of the Marshall Project, admitted in the Guardian (11/21/24) that Kennedy’s “anti-vaccine views are beyond the pale,” but said he understood that “our healthcare system is a national disgrace hiding in plain sight.” Barsky added, “He recognizes the inordinate control the pharmaceutical and food industries [have] over healthcare policy.”

But Kennedy does not actually propose to replace that “national disgrace”; asked whether he supported a Medicare for All system, which would be a real step toward curbing the power of the pharmaceutical industry, his response was incoherent (Jacobin, 6/9/23):

My highest ambition would be to have a single-payer program . . . where people who want to have private programs can go ahead and do that, but to have a single program that is available to everybody.

In other words, he thinks “single payer” should be one of the payers!

So it is questionable how much Kennedy really wants to address these issues. But even if one were to give him the benefit of the doubt, the pro-business, anti-regulation nature of the rest of the incoming administration suggests there is scant hope any of Kennedy’s health food talk would ever become meaningful policy.

For example, Mande’s answer that Trump would allow Kennedy to make school lunches more nutritious appears naive in view of Trump’s first term, in which he rolled “back healthier standards for school lunches in America championed by [former First Lady] Michelle Obama,” moving to “allow more pizza, meat and potatoes over fresh vegetables, fruits and whole grains” (Guardian, 1/17/22).

In fact, Kennedy already seems at odds with Trump’s pick for agriculture secretary (Politico, 11/29/24), who will be his main influence over US food policy. Big Pharma already has Trump’s ear (Reuters, 11/27/24). And Kennedy has already felt the pressure of his new boss’s love of fast food when he threw out his ideals and posed with a Big Mac and a Coke (New York Post, 11/7/24).

As SEIU President April Verrett (11/15/24) explained, none of Kennedy’s pseudo-populist sloganeering can really outweigh the danger he poses if he becomes a part of state power:

SEIU members know that healthcare must be grounded in science and evidence-based medicine. Our healthcare workers put their lives on the line to protect patients during the darkest days of the pandemic, and we would have lost many more members and loved ones if it weren’t for lifesaving vaccines. We will not stand silent as an outspoken anti-vaxxer who spread misinformation about autism and widespread public health interventions is poised to take control of one of our most consequential government agencies.

‘Legitimating his extremist positions’

Beatrice Adler-Bolton: “Media have allowed this anti-science and ableist rhetoric to be normalized at a mass scale.”

Pundits in the New York Times and elsewhere taking Kennedy at his word are part of a broader problem in the media, according to Beatrice Adler-Bolton, co-host of the podcast Death Panel. Media frame his MAHA movement to sound “like a health-focused initiative,” she told FAIR in an email, but it’s actually a “platform for dangerous rhetoric and fake science that directly undermines public health research”:

By framing RFK Jr. as a semi-legitimate voice on health issues at all, not only does it bolster the credibility of the MAHA agenda, the media have allowed this anti-science and ableist rhetoric to be normalized at a mass scale, effectively legitimating his extremist positions on vaccines, climate change and chronic disease without sufficient scrutiny, right before his appointment will be up for debate in the Senate. Truly scary stuff.

Rather than critically examining his stances, mainstream outlets often frame his views as “alternative” or “controversial,” which not only normalizes them but implicitly elevates them to the level of mainstream discourse, or further bolsters his reputation among the wellness community as a class warrior/truth teller.

This is particularly problematic in the context of his potential role at HHS, where his views could directly influence policy, research and local health department budgets, drug approvals, healthcare safety guidelines, disability determinations, disease surveillance, health statistics, public health disaster and epidemic preparedness, and so much more, making the media’s soft treatment of him even more dangerous.

‘Failures of the pandemic response’

“Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy claimed (New York Post, 7/23/23), citing this as evidence that the virus “is ethnically targeted.”

These efforts to find a silver lining in the Kennedy appointment, strenuously searching for common ground on which progressives and medical professionals can work with him, necessarily involved distorting the record in order to create a potential good-faith ally who doesn’t exist. Bedard’s piece in the Times, for example, twisted the facts in writing about the context for Kennedy’s rise:

There’s been no meaningful, public reckoning from the federal government on the successes and failures of the nation’s pandemic response. Americans dealt with a patchwork of measures—school closings, mask requirements, limits on gatherings, travel bans—with variable successes and trade-offs. Many felt pressured into accepting recently developed, rapidly tested vaccines that were often required to attend school, keep one’s job or spend time in public spaces.

The Biden administration did, in fact, reflect on the Covid pandemic to better plan for upcoming pandemics (NPR, 4/16/24; STAT, 4/16/24; PBS, 4/16/24), as scientific journals and government agencies have looked at the last pandemic to come up with planning for the future. The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability (11/14/24) recently held a hearing on the subject, and the Government Accountability Office (7/11/23) offered nearly 400 recommendations on improving pandemic planning. It might be fair to evaluate how well this effort is going, but that’s not what Bedard wrote.

And the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates were popular when they were being rolled out (Gallup, 9/24/21)—as one might expect when an effective preventive measure is introduced to combat a contagious virus killing hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Meanwhile, the fresh face that Bedard hopes will give us a meaningful reckoning, the one that the Biden administration supposedly failed to give us, endorsed a xenophobic, antisemitic conspiracy theory to explain the coronavirus (New York Post, 7/23/23): “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

Bedard sanewashed this lunacy, saying that RFK Jr. “is right that vaccine mandates are a place where community safety and individual liberties collide.” “Official communication about vaccine safety can be more alienating to skeptics than reassuring,” she declared.

If someone wrote that traffic lights are a place where road safety and drivers’ liberties collide, and that traffic enforcement was alienating to red light skeptics, the Times would laugh it off. Yet the Times let a doctor give oxygen to such nonsense, even as she admitted that vaccines are only effective when an overwhelming majority of the population gets them.

Places like the Times have also published criticism of Kennedy (New York Times, 11/18/24), including a thorough look at his role in the American Samoa crisis (New York Times, 11/25/24). But corporate media have no obligation to bend the truth to offer the “other side” of an anti-vaccine extremist who is only taken seriously because his last name happens to be Kennedy.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

Next week, our guest Chase Strangio will make history as the first openly transgender lawyer to argue before the Supreme Court. Strangio will argue on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBTQ & HIV Project that Tennessee’s state ban on gender-affirming hormone therapies for transgender children is a form of sex discrimination. “Our hope is that the cultural anxiety about trans people … is not going to sway the justices from applying straightforward constitutional principles,” says Strangio about the case. We also discuss recent cultural backlash against trans rights as part of an “approach to gender that is regressive and dangerous.” The Democratic Party has been unwilling to provide a robust defense to conservative attacks on trans identity, says Strangio, ceding ground to the further loss of the community’s civil rights and protections. Yet even as trans people are “demonized” and blamed for structural problems in the U.S., he adds, “We have always resisted. We have always taken care of each other. No matter what happens, that is what we’ll do.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

“There are no means of countering such a missile; no means of intercepting it exist in the world today,” Putin said. “We need to launch its serial production. Let us assume that the decision on the serial production of this system has been made. As a matter of fact, it has already been essentially organised.”

This means there are already, or will shortly be deployed, dozens of Oreshniki missiles for firing at targets in the Ukraine west of the Dnieper River and as far west as the Polish and Hungarian borders.

This also means that no American, no NATO staff group, no Anglo-American target intelligence unit in bunkers in Kiev or Lvov are safe any longer. Nor are Vladimir Zelensky and his advisors. To escape Israeli-precedent decapitation, they must all decamp to the Ukrainian war operations  mock-up already prepared on the Polish side of the border.

Ukrainian military intelligence head, Kirill Budanov, has claimed that the Oreshnik strike on the Yuzhmash (Pivdenmash) plant in Dniepropetrovsk  is “just a cipher…We know for sure that as of October they were supposed to make two research samples, maybe they made a little bit more, but believe me, this is a research sample, but not yet serial production, thank God.”

“Wishful thinking,” a NATO military source comments. “He’ll get the chance to find out first- hand.”

Russian military sources add that, following disclosure of the Kremlin’s back-channel talks with Donald Trump and his advisors on terms for an end-of-war settlement, the Oreshnik is the signal that the “General Staff are  talking directly to Trump & Co.”  Putin was explicit in his first announcement of the Oreshnik firing: “We believe that the United States [President Trump] made a mistake by unilaterally destroying the INF Treaty in 2019 under a far-fetched pretext.”

Dmitry Rogozin — formerly Russian NATO ambassador, then deputy prime minister in charge of the Russian military industrial complex,  now senator for Zaporozhye  – carefully identified the credit for the Oreshnik: “Today, everyone who fought for the creation of this missile system, who overcame what we may call scepticism,  should congratulate each other. And I join those congratulations. Good for you!…Thank you to the Supreme [Command, Верховному] for supporting the work! Thank you to the Academy for not backing away!”

A Russian source, who does not believe Putin ordered the General Staff to suspend its electric war campaign between August and this month, believes Russian strategy now is “a thousand cuts. The Oreshnik is a particularly deep one but I don’t believe that the Kremlin and General Staff have decided to use it to hit Bankova [street address in Kiev of the presidential offices and living quarters ]. The decapitation threat is real enough though to impel Zelensky to exit, or maybe for the Ukrainian military to get rid of him on their own initiative.”

“Just as important,” the source says, “the Russian ground offensive in the east will remain slow, patient, maybe for two years more. The priority is on preventing Russian casualties, conserving Russian lives. This is essential once you realize that the [Putin] presidential succession also depends, not only on winning the war on Russian terms, but ensuring the protection of Russian lives.”

Oreshnik in Russian means, literally, hazel nut or the wood of the hazelnut tree. In Siberia, the cognate expression “to give nuts” has the metaphorical meaning of inflicting punishment.

Watch and listen to this video recording of the sequence of warhead strikes on November 21.  In this second videoclip,  the unique funnel of light is displayed six times as the warheads land on target.

As Putin pointed out in his national address on the evening after the Oreshnik strike, it had been then-President Trump’s “mistake” in 2019 to unilaterally withdraw from the 1987 Soviet-American treaty on intermediate range nuclear forces (INF). Oreshnik is both the Russian reply  and also a warning to Trump to correct his mistake.

For the time being, the Financial Times, a Japanese propaganda outlet in London, reported a Norwegian graduate student as claiming “there certainly was no military value to it.”

In Moscow, Izvestia, on which the BBC has relied for republication, reported “it is likely that we are dealing with a new generation of Russian intermediate-range missiles [with a range of] 2,500-3,000km (1,550-1,860 miles) and potentially extending to 5,000km (3,100 miles), but not intercontinental. It is obviously equipped with a separating warhead with individual guidance units.”

This means the missile is MIRV, comprising multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles. Close observation of the strike videoclips shows six of these releasing six munitions capable of penetrating deep underground bunkers. A salvo of thirty-six warhead detonations, altogether.

Missile speed is reported to be between Mach 10 and Mach 11.

The Militarist military blog of Moscow reports this image of the  predecessor RSD-10 Pioneer missile “can give a definite idea of the appearance of the Oreshnik.”

Although satellite images of the plant after Thursday’s attack have not been declassified or published in the open, what is likely is that the bunker stocks of ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles being prepared at the plant for launching against Russia were destroyed, along with the factory-floor and machine capacities of the plant to service HIMARS, other rocket and missile firing equipment delivered by the US and NATO states to the Zelensky regime.

Russian military sources have been discussing Ukrainian target options since the Putin Pause ended on November 17,  and the electric war recommenced with the General Staff’s 120-missile, 90-drone raid against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure across the country. For more on the Putin Pause, click to read this  and this.

Source: https://johnhelmer.net/

The sources differ on whether the military initiative has now been delegated by Putin to the General Staff without the autumn restrictions, and whether the President has decided the Biden Administration’s escalation has Trump’s tacit endorsement in a calculated “escalate-to-deescalate” plan.

A Russian military source cautions against confusing Russia’s operational priorities now that Oreshnik has been unleashed, and the strategic priorities which haven’t changed. “Will the generals go for Zelensky and take out the whole illegitimate regime if another ATAMCS hits deep Russia? You bet. The Israelis have made it very easy for Putin. But I do not think the generals or the Security Council or all of the Duma care so much at the moment. Zelensky isn’t a priority because his own soldiers will do him in.”

“I also see there is no pause for Trump. No deference, no hidden messages, and no respite irrespective of what talks might or not be going on behind the scenes. This is a signal that the trust in Trump is near zero, and even less so for [Elon] Musk and the love fest the two of them have been displaying. There’s only one message Trump can give now to show his intention for an end of the war, and that’s to get Zelensky to announce elections by next March. That would signal the end of the neo-Nazi regime, and of course, the end of Zelensky too.”

The military sources also emphasize the warnings to the US, its European and Asian allies in the small print of the new nuclear doctrine signed by Putin on November 19.

Source: https://rg.ru/documents/
Sputnik has published this “unofficial” translation into English.

The sources note that Paragraph 9   warns that nuclear deterrence is “directed against states that provide their controlled territory, airspace and/or maritime space and resources for the preparation and implementation of aggression against the Russian Federation.” Paragraph 11 then goes on to link nuclear with non-nuclear states in the NATO treaty, as well as the AUKUS  and G7 blocs; in Asia these include Japan and Australia. “Aggression against the Russian Federation and/or its allies by any non-nuclear state with the participation or support of a nuclear state is considered as their joint attack.”

This is once again Putin’s cross-hairs warning to Poland and Romania for their US nuclear-capable Tomahawk missile bases at Redzikowo and Deveselu.  The cross-hairs warning was first given by Putin in Greece in 2016.  Now that the Greek government itself has agreed to secretly hosting US nuclear weapons at the Souda Bay base in Crete, the warning applies to Greece itself.

“Nuclear deterrence,” as Paragraph 12 of the Doctrine says, “is aimed at ensuring that a potential adversary understands the inevitability of retaliation in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation and/or its allies.” Greece, Spain,  and Germany are also now targeted according to Paragraph 15(e) because they allow “the deployment of nuclear weapons and their means of delivery on the territories of non-nuclear states”; and according to Paragraph 15(g) because of the “actions of a potential enemy aimed at isolating part of the territory of the Russian Federation, including blocking access to vital transport communications”. In Europe this expands Russia’s targets to the Baltic states around Kaliningrad, as well as to the North Sea states  Sweden, Norway  and Denmark which participated in the Nord Stream-2 sabotage and now threaten Russian maritime movement through the Danish Straits.

Map of European Capitals within Range of  Oreshnik (Kalingrad launch)

Source: https://t.me/readovkanews/89690
With an estimated 1,500 kgs of combat payload, lifting to a maximum height of 12 km and moving at a speed of Mach 10,  the Oreshnik launched from Kaliningrad  would strike Warsaw in 1 minute 21 seconds; Berlin, 2 min 35 sec; Paris, 6 min 52 sec; London, 6 min 56 sec.

Of direct impact for Russian strategy on the Ukrainian battlefield, the Doctrine provisions mean that Odessa will, in the words of a Moscow source, “never again be allowed to be a base against Russia.”

The Oreshnik strike of November 21, the military sources in Moscow believe, demonstrates the military capacity to strike with either conventional or nuclear warheads at targets throughout Europe which none of the available US Patriot or other western air defence systems can defend against. It creates a conventional alternative to nuclear retaliation if, as Paragraph 19(d) of the Doctrine says, there is “aggression against the Russian Federation and/or the Republic of Belarus as members of the Union State with the use of conventional weapons, creating a critical threat to their sovereignty and/or territorial integrity” (emphasis added).

Before Oreshnik, the Russians point out, Washington was saying there was nothing new in Putin’s nuclear doctrine paper. “Observing no changes to Russia’s nuclear posture, we have not seen any reason to adjust our own nuclear posture or doctrine in response to Russia’s statements today,” Reuters reported the National Security Council as saying on November 19.

After Oreshnik, in presentations at a Washington think tank on November 21, Pentagon officials announced: “adjustments to the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review may be required to sustain the ability to achieve nuclear deterrence, in light of enhanced nuclear capabilities of China and Russia and possible lack of nuclear arms control agreements after February.”

The President with the Defense Minister and other officials at the Kremlin on November 22.
Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/

Look carefully again at what Putin has announced for Oreshnik. By saying on November 21 “we also carried out tests of one of Russia’s latest medium-range missile systems,” he implied that the Yuzhmash strike may be a one-off. That depends, he added: “our decision on further deployment of intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles will depend on the actions of the United States and its satellites. We will determine the targets during further tests of our advanced missile systems based on the threats to the security of the Russian Federation.”

If the US adds to or refills the Kiev regime’s stocks of ATACMS; if the Starmer Government authorizes a new Storm Shadow firing across the border; likewise for President Emmanuel Macron for the SCALP missile, and for German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for the supply of Taurus missiles, then Putin’s warning on November 22 of serial production of Oreshniki has confirmed “inevitable retaliation”.

“As I have already said, we will continue these tests, including in combat conditions, depending on the situation and the nature of the security threats posed to Russia. All the more so as we have a stockpile of such products, a reserve of such systems ready for use.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Helmer.

Children make up nearly 40% of the more than 3.4 million people displaced in Myanmar due to the civil war, UNICEF said Thursday.

The findings from United Nations Children’s Fund came as an organization that monitors conflict in Myanmar said the ruling junta and affiliated groups have killed more than 670 children since the military seized power in a February 2021 coup d’etat, sparking the conflict.

In a statement on Thursday -- a day after World Children’s Day -- UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Ted Chaiban said that the humanitarian crisis in Myanmar is “reaching a critical inflection point,” with escalating conflict and climate shocks “putting children and families at unprecedented risk.”

He said that approximately 1 million people have been affected by the country’s war, which was sparked amid public opposition to the military takeover, and devastation caused by late September’s Cyclone Yagi -- Southeast Asia’s worst storm of the year.

Chaiban said that during a recent trip to Myanmar’s embattled Kachin state, he saw children “cut off from vital services, including healthcare and education, and suffering from the effects of violence and displacement.”

“[I] saw firsthand how vulnerable children and other civilians are in conflict-affected areas and the urgent need to uphold international humanitarian law to protect them from such brutal attacks,” he said.

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Chaiban noted that minors account for 32% of the more than 1,000 people injured and killed by landmines and other explosive devices since the start of the conflict.

“The increasing use of deadly weapons in civilian areas, including airstrikes and landmines hitting homes, hospitals, and schools, has severely restricted the already limited safe spaces for children, robbing them of their right to safety and security,” he said, adding that “the situation is dire.”

Chaiban called for all stakeholders in Myanmar to guarantee safe and unhindered aid, especially for children and families in conflict zones, to remove administrative barriers and ensure minimum operating standards and to protect children from grave violations.

“International humanitarian law must be upheld, with a focus on protecting civilians and civilian infrastructure - including schools and hospitals - and ensuring safe passage for those fleeing from violence,” he said.

Additionally, he urged the international community to increase its support for the country’s children through funding and advocacy.

“The cost of inaction is far too high — Myanmar’s children cannot afford to wait,” he said.

Hundreds of children killed

Also on Thursday, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners - Burma reported that, as of Nov. 20, the junta and its affiliate groups had killed at least 671 children in Myanmar since the coup nearly four years ago.

The group said that the number showed a year-on-year increase in child mortality rates, attributable to the conflict.

In 2021, AAPP said, 101 children under the age of 18 were reported killed, followed by 136 the following year. By 2023, the number had increased to 208 and, by the end of 2024, had reached 226 child fatalities.

In one of the worst incidents since the coup, the junta bombed Konlaw village in Kachin state’s Momauk township on Nov. 15, killing nine displaced people, including seven children, the group said.

Amid an escalating toll of child casualties caused by airstrikes, Naw Susanna Hla Hla Soe, the shadow National Unity Government’s Minister of Women, Youth, and Children’s Affairs, called for urgent measures to ban the sale of aviation fuel to Myanmar’s military.

“We urgently request the cessation of aircraft fuel sales to the military regime, as it is being used to carry out brutal attacks that result in the killing of children,” she said during remarks delivered at a World Children’s Day event in Myanmar on Wednesday.

Attempts by RFA to reach junta spokesperson Major General Zaw Min Tun for comment on the situation facing children in Myanmar went unanswered Thursday.

According to the AAPP, junta authorities have killed at least 5,974 civilians since the military coup.

Translated by Kalyar Lwin. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Burmese.

Public health officials are decrying President-elect Donald Trump for selecting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. If confirmed, Kennedy would head a sprawling agency that oversees drug, vaccine and food safety, as well as medical research. Kennedy is one of the nation’s most prominent vaccine skeptics and has spread numerous public health conspiracy theories. Kennedy has claimed HIV may not cause AIDS. He claimed COVID-19 was designed to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. He has claimed chemicals in the nation’s water supply are leading more children to be gay and transgender, and he’s publicly spoken about removing fluoride from drinking water. “I can’t think of a darker time for public health in America and globally than now,” says Lawrence Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown University. “He has no fidelity to truth, to science. … He will make America sick, certainly not healthier again.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

In a video widely circulated on social media, one young man who said he took part said many riders were looking for a way to make some memories with a temporary escape from the pressure and stresses of their lives.

He said the rides were originally conceived as a cheap way to have fun by college kids looking for a summer jaunt on a tight budget, using ubiquitous hired bikes from urban schemes.

“If we could afford to buy motorcycles or cars, there’s no way we would be riding hired bikes,” the man said in a social media video posted as the authorities began a nationwide clampdown on mass riding activities, apparently fearing a possible re-run of the 2022 “white paper” movement that triggered the end of COVID-19 restrictions.

“We’re too poor to go on vacations, to socialize or to go abroad, or to take part in sports activities at a high level,” he said. “We’re so poor that the best we dare to hope for is a bowl of dumpling soup after a midnight bike ride.”

He said young people are expected to show absolute obedience to those in authority, yet have no job opportunities to show for it.

“We’ve done as we were told for more than 20 years now, and we’ll likely have to go on doing as we’re told for the rest of our lives,” the man said. “And yet most of us will likely only make about 3,000 yuan (US$415) a month even after we graduate, and somehow get by on that for a lifetime.”

“I don’t want to grow old without a single thing worth remembering,” he said. “We’re not getting any younger, so that’s why we do stuff like this.”

The night-cycling craze went viral after the first group of young women made the night trip on hired bikes to Kaifeng in June, was widely reported by official media as a boost to the “night-time economy.”

“These youthful adventures embody a vibrant spirit — full of curiosity, determination, and a zest for discovery — that adds new dimensions to the tourism industry,” the People’s Daily online edition gushed in a Nov. 7 article on the craze.

“Far from being just a passing fad, this movement reflects a generation that craves flexible and diverse lifestyles despite their busy schedules,” the article said. “It also highlights the resilience and adaptability of China’s economy, flourishing as it evolves alongside the aspirations of its young people.”

‘They find a way to vent'

But shortly after hundreds of thousands of people turned out on a ride on Nov. 8, including politically sensitive groups like People’s Liberation Army veterans, the authorities clamped down on the gatherings, placing students across northern China under lockdown in their university campuses.

According to a post on the blogging platform Botanwang, students were hauled back to campuses and kept in their classrooms for several hours after the clampdown on the mass bike rides began, and given a movie to watch before being finally allowed to return to their dorms.

Luis Liang, a young graduate who recently graduated from a university in China and has since migrated to Germany, said he could relate to the students' accounts of their bike rides.

“What he said is true,” Liang told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview, in a reference to the young man’s video. “Unless you come from a powerful family ... all you have if you don’t go to college is the prospect of doing work that isn’t fit for human beings to try to earn a living. Even if you do, what can you learn from the suffocating education that you get in a Chinese university?”

“They’re desperate, and they can’t see any way to better themselves, so they find a way to vent,” he said.

He said the majority of young Chinese people aren’t generally thinking about challenging the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

“Freedom is a luxury that they daren’t even think about, so they try to do as they’re told and work hard,” Liang said. “If they could just improve their lives and those of their families just a little bit, they’d be happy, and wouldn’t dream of challenging the government.”

“But in today’s China, they can’t even fulfill those humble goals, so they’ve had enough,” he said.

“This kind of protest can fuel hope and encourage other young people, yet the authorities will suppress it and spend a lot of money on maintaining stability, even if they know that it doesn’t actually pose any kind of threat,” he said.

Wu Renhua, who was present at the student-led pro-democracy protests on Tiananmen Square in the spring and early summer of 1989, said the night rides to Kaifeng didn’t appear to have the same kind of focused agenda that was seen among young people around the country in the late 1980s.

“These cycle rides may not have amounted to a movement this time around, but there’s no guarantee that that won’t happen next time,” Wu said. “The college students of today aren’t like those of 1989, but you can still get demonstrations.”

He said the government is very nervous about any large gathering of people.

“If anything changes China, it’ll be a mass movement caused by something other than politics, or at least it won’t be political at the beginning,” Wu said.

“Everyone’s dissatisfaction with the system has been suppressed for so long that people will start out just connecting with each other via non-political gatherings,” he said.

“But once people start gathering, someone could suddenly start raising political demands.”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

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That puts the Biden administration’s delegation at the United Nations climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, in an awkward position. At COP29, as this year’s conference is known, governments are expected to tout major new policies to fight climate change. But anything the outgoing administration announces now could be dead on arrival when Trump is inaugurated in January. 

Nevertheless, the Biden team appears to be hoping that a push for one of the world’s most controversial forms of zero-emissions power will be more palatable to the president’s successor. On the conference’s third day on Wednesday, the administration announced that it would set a goal to triple U.S. nuclear power capacity by 2050. That would involve adding around 200 gigawatts of new nuclear generation by supporting both the kinds of large reactors familiar to many Americans as well as new “small modular” facilities that are easier to construct and permit. The administration pledged to work with nuclear developers and power utilities to find the cheapest and easiest places to build big plants — and to push out almost $1 billion in support for small modular reactors. 

“Over the last four years the United States has really established the industrial capacity and the muscle memory across the economy to carry out this plan,” said Ali Zaidi, the White House national climate advisor, in an interview with Bloomberg at COP29.

Biden officials are well aware that Trump and the Republican Party have frequently embraced nuclear energy as a reliable and clean solution for the country’s growing electricity needs. The party’s platform this year stated that “Republicans will unleash Energy Production from all sources, including nuclear.” Earlier this year, a Pew Research poll found that around two-thirds of Republican voters support expanding nuclear power, a higher rate than for Democrats. As John Podesta, Biden’s senior climate advisor, said during a press conference at COP29, “The desire to build out next-generation nuclear is still there.”

However, the Republican Party — and even the president-elect himself — is hardly of one mind when it comes to nuclear power. During his three-hour interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan, Trump said that nuclear power is “very clean” but also noted that the reactors “get too big and too complex and too expensive,” citing significant cost overruns and delays at Georgia’s Plant Vogtle, where new nuclear reactors opened this year.

Still, Malwina Qvist, the director of the nuclear energy program at the research and advocacy nonprofit Clean Air Task Force, said nuclear power has the potential to be a rare area of consensus between Biden and Trump when it comes to climate change and energy, especially given recent pushes to revive nuclear power in localities across the country. California lawmakers passed a bill earlier this year that will enable the state’s Diablo Canyon power plant to stay open through 2030, juiced by a $1.1 billion investment from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Meanwhile, in September Microsoft announced that it would buy power from a reopened nuclear plant at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island, the site of an infamous reactor meltdown in 1979.

“We’ve seen bipartisan support for nuclear energy over the years and growing appetite for developing new and preserving existing nuclear energy from governors in red and blue states alike,” she said. Qvist added that her organization aims to “preserve the gains made during this administration, and to advance them during the next.”

But fears that reactor meltdowns will lead to disastrous releases of radiation, as well as the fact that nuclear waste remains radioactive for millenia and must be stored in secure locations, can make nuclear energy a hard sell. A number of environmental organizations, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, oppose a nuclear revival for these reasons. Even so, over the course of its history there have been far fewer deaths attributed to nuclear per unit of energy created than to the fossil-fuel-powered plants it can replace. 

Either way, the Biden administration’s last-minute nuclear agenda is unlikely to be enough to triple power generation on its own. Much recent investment in the U.S. nuclear space has gone toward keeping alive or reopening the plants that already exist across the country, but building a fleet of large new reactors would require billions of dollars more in new capital — more even than the massive Inflation Reduction Act, the largest clean energy investment in U.S. history, provides through its tax subsidy provisions. 

“To fulfill this demand will necessitate a step-change in financing,” said Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a global nuclear advocacy organization, on the eve of COP29. “Financing nuclear power plants, particularly the upfront costs, requires government participation.”

The Biden administration can lay the groundwork for nuclear growth, but it will be up to Trump and his new Republican Congress to decide whether they want to provide that participation.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden wants to triple nuclear energy generation. Trump will make the call. on Nov 14, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

From the misty peaks of Cape Reinga to the rain-soaked streets of Kawakawa, Aotearoa New Zealand’s national hīkoi mō Te Tiriti rolled through the north and arrived in Whangārei.

Since setting off this morning numbers have swelled from a couple of hundred to well over 1000 people, demonstrating their opposition to the coalition government’s controversial Treaty Principles Bill and other policies impacting on Māori.

Hundreds gathered for a misty covered dawn karakia at Te Rerenga Wairua, the very top of the North Island, after meeting at the nearby town of Te Kāo the night before.

• READ MORE: Meeting with Seymour ‘pointless’, say protest hīkoi organisers
• NZ’s Treaty Principles Bill protest hīkoi begins in Far North
• Other Toitū te Tiriti Hīkoi reports
• Follow RNZ’s live updates here

Among them was veteran Māori rights activist and former MP Hone Harawira. He says the hīkoi is about protesting against a “blitzkreig of oppression” from the government and uplifting Māori.

Harawira praised organisers of the hīkoi and set out his own hopes for the march.

“It’s been a great start to the day . . .  to come here to Te Rerenga Wairua with people from all around the country and just join together, have a karakia, have some waiata and start to move on. We’re ready to go and Wellington is waiting — we can’t keep them waiting.

“One of our kuia said it best last night. The last hīkoi built a party — the Māori Party — [but] let’s make this hīkoi build a nation. Let us focus on that,” Harawira said.

Margie Thomson and her partner James travelled from Auckland to join the hīkoi.

She said as a Pākeha, she was gutted by some of the government policies toward Māori and wanted to show support.

“The spirit of the people here is really profound . . . if people could feel they would really see the reality of the kāupapa here — the togetherness. This is really something, there is a really strong Māori movement and you really feel it.”

By lunchtime the hīkoi had reached Kaiatia where numbers swelled to well over 1000 people. The main street had to be closed to traffic while supporters filled the streets with flags, waiata and haka.

The hīkoi arrived in Whangārei this evening after covering a distance of around 280 km.

Kākā Porowini marae in central Whangārei was hosting some of the supporters and its chair, Taipari Munro, said they were prepared to care for the masses

“Hapu are able to pull those sorts of things together. But of course it will build as the hīkoi travels south.

“The various marae and places where people will be hosted, will all be under preparation now.”

Three marae have been made available for people to stay at in Whangārei and some kai will also be provided, he said.

Meanwhile, the Māori Law Society has set up a phone number to provide free legal assistance to marchers taking part in the hīkoi.

Spokesperson Echo Haronga said Māori lawyers wanted to support the hīkoi in their own way.

“This helpline is a demonstration of our manaakitanga as Māori legal professionals wanting to tautoko those people who are on the hīkoi. If a question arises for them, they’re not quite sure how handle it during the hīkoi then they know they can call this number they can speak to a Māori lawyer.”

Haronga stressed that she did not anticipate any issues or disturbances with the police and the helpline was open to any questions or concerns not just police and criminal enquiries.

“It’s not actually limited to people causing a ruckus and being in trouble with the police, it also could be someone who has a question . . . and they wouldn’t know otherwise where to go to, you can also call us for that if it’s in relation to hīkoi business.”

Hīkoi supporters will stay in Whangārei for the night before travelling to Dargaville and Auckland’s North Shore tomorrow.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Joakim Wei Bernild: I’m not going to get into how we met, but as to how the band started out, I think Anton was the initiator—he’d made some music and called me up, right?

Anton Falck: I had made a demo song and some music guy had heard it, randomly, and wanted to book me for a festival, and I was like, “What the fuck?” And then I felt like I had to make a band. Joakim was a natural choice, because we were both noobs, so we were on the same level, on the same page.

JWB: Even though we only had one or two songs, we were given a 45-minute slot.

AF: We didn’t understand then that we had the power to say that we wouldn’t be able to play for that long.

JWB: We sat down and made 45 minutes’ worth of songs.

AF: Really long songs.

I’m going to assume that “Holiday,” one of your earliest singles, which is fairly standard-length and radio-ready, wasn’t one of them. I love the journey—the sort of “breakup in paradise” plot line—that “Holiday’s” lyrics chart. Its first lines—“Good, skin-kissing summer days/ Sun City, I’m here to stay”—capture the feeling, the boundless optimism, that characterizes the first moments of going on vacation. I still like to listen to it whenever I’m stepping out of an airplane, down one of those staircases on wheels. It’s the perfect score for that moment: the humid air of somewhere tropical hitting you in the face, and you’re all hyped up about how much leisure lies ahead of you.

AF: It’s funny because I’m really not a vacation person. I’ve never traveled to a warm country with palm trees just to relax. I tried doing it for the first time two years ago. I went on a normal holiday because we’d been traveling so much, seeing the world, but always through the lens of being on tour. It is a very different way of traveling. I find that going—just going—on a vacation is really, really weird. I don’t know what to do with myself. It’s not for me. I think that, for me, the song is more of a metaphor, somehow—a state of mind.

I had taken the song’s refrain—“Our love was a holiday”—and the plea that it ends on—“Won’t you just hold me one last time?”—to describe a kind of romance that can’t be fitted into a routine, and can only exist in this exceptional, time-out-of-time space of a vacation.

JWB: We had a few years, three or four years, during which we toured a lot, and that’s when we wrote that song.

AF: When you’re a musician at our level of the industry, the work of touring is its own reward, because you know you’re not going to come home with a ton of money. It was always about trying to have as much fun as possible while away. We knew it was a specific time in our lives that we would look back on at some point, one that wouldn’t last forever. Touring is this weird kind of holiday. You’re away from home, but it’s still work.

You’re both from Denmark. A lot of ink has been spilled on the topic of the outsized success that Scandinavians—and, I think, Swedes in particular—enjoy in the field of popular music. There’s this cultural hypothesis that it’s because they place a great deal of emphasis on music education programs and choral music in early childhood.

AF: It could also have something to do with the way a language is built. When Swedish people talk, they sound like they’re singing. I speak Swedish, and for a long time when we were writing songs, I would sing in Swedish first to come up with the melodies, then translate the lyrics, because we don’t want to release music in Swedish.

JWB: We’ve done something similar with Japanese. We don’t speak Japanese, but we can emulate the way it sounds to come up with melodies.

AF: Languages really change the way you sing. Japanese songs rarely rhyme, but somehow they don’t sound weird. If you were to sing without rhyming in Danish, it would sound really, really strange.

Did you guys see that movie Triangle of Sadness? So much of the dialogue didn’t hit my ear right, and I think that had a lot to do with the fact that Ruben Östlund, the film’s writer and director, was working outside his native language. It struck me that what might figure as a hurdle for someone writing a film in which the characters engage in believable exchanges might actually be ideal for someone writing really moving pop songs, which tend to deal in hyperbole and cliché. To write a pop song in English, you don’t necessarily need to be extremely acquainted with how native speakers actually go about using it in their day-to-day lives. What do you make of your choice to write and record music in English?

AF: We never could have written the same songs in Danish; listening to them would probably make us want to throw up. Then, of course, there’s the practicality of wanting to be understood by as many people as possible, to have an audience outside of little baby Denmark, a country of only six million people. When I write in English, I find myself falling into using the same 500 words that are nearest to me. In English, we can get away with expressing ourselves in a way that is somehow more blunt and honest. I spend a lot of time reading thesauruses, looking words up online, or even taking my lyrics and translating them into Latin or Portuguese, then translating the output into yet another language, back and forth a few times in Google Translate, and then bringing them back into English. Somehow, Google Translate will fuck it up or add some weird extra layer, and sometimes—by doing shit like that—I’ll find the most beautiful words. We proudly use a lot of cheat codes.

There’s this line in your song “Someone New” that goes, “Hey baby, this is goodbye. Like, ‘talk to you never.’” How eye-roll-inducing that would be as a line of dialogue in a film or a novel! Yet it plays so well in the context of a pop song; it really lands.

AF: We’re always trying to position ourselves right on the cusp of irony and a kind of seriousness that can be cringe. It might be hard for people to decipher, but we actually—most of the time—mean everything we say.

JWB: It’s difficult for us to imagine what it would be like to listen to our music as a native English speaker. I often think about that with rap music, where all of these really harsh things are said. If the same things were being said in Danish, I don’t know if I could bear being out in society—to hear that playing in the background, very casually, in the supermarket while I shop.

Speaking of supermarkets, I wanted to ask you guys about money—

AF: How much do you need?

A lot! Last year, you had an installation at the Copenhagen Contemporary, a kind of popup shop called the First Hate Supermarket, stocked with items—such as framed portraits and towels with your faces printed on them—that far surpassed the typical merchandise offering for bands.

AF: I don’t know how this compares internationally, but in Denmark right now, people are really focused on owning the right apartment, the right designer clothes, the right car—maybe a Tesla if they can. Everybody’s having kids and everything has to look perfect. For a while, we were also considering where to take this project, sort of along those lines. Did we want to follow our guts and keep making weird, alternative pop music? Should we record a song in Danish and make it a national hit in Denmark and try to make money off it? We put so much work into the music, but when it comes down to it, with the way the music industry is put together now, with Spotify and streaming, we aren’t really making any money from the music. We want to make a living from what we do, but people only want to buy things. The “Supermarket” was a provocation. We wanted to make money by selling all of this stuff that is external to the music, while also drawing attention to the reality that it’s one of the only ways that we can make a living.

Much of the merchandise was emblazoned with this logo, a sort of amalgamation of various planetary symbols, that appears throughout your imagery as a band. Your song “Fortune Teller” features a play on words in the phrase “pull up,” which means both the action of drawing a Tarot card and, in contemporary slang, of arriving somewhere in style. Is astrology something you believe in? Is magic?

AF: It’s a funny tendency how, in the last few years, everyone in our generation got a deck of Tarot cards or downloaded some kind of astrology app, but these things have definitely always been a theme for us. The First Hate symbol is more than just a logo; it’s also a rune or a sigil. It’s a way of directing a lot of energy into a single symbol—and it doesn’t have to be something that other people understand for it to make sense to us. I mean…maybe if you know, you know.

Your first full-length album was titled A Prayer for the Unemployed. What kinds of jobs have you guys held—or not held?

AF: We’ve always been hustling different jobs. Our friend Dee, who’s from Scotland, found a laminated card in a church where she grew up that said “A Prayer for the Unemployed,” and we thought that was really funny.

When your song “Commercial” was released in the spring of 2022, I and many other barely employed members of our generation’s creative class were, perhaps a little cynically, banking on the belief that investing in cryptocurrencies and other digital assets would be our ticket to long-term financial solvency. I would listen to that song on repeat during the days when it was my job to moderate a group chat for the owners of an NFT—a literal .gif that they had purchased for hundreds of dollars. I was supposed to whip them into a frenzy, insisting that the token’s value was poised to surge, and muting or blocking users for expressing what we called “F.U.D”—which, initially, I thought stood for “fucked-up discourse,” but actually stood for “fear, uncertainty, and doubt.” It was weird, the way that song’s refrains of “Money loves me” and “Pump the prices” were uncanny echoes, almost word for word, of the sorts of sentiments I was being paid to encourage and reward.

JKB: What you were doing there is very much what major labels do with their artists. They take an artist and pump them up and give them loans—money, but also jewelry and fancy cars—and then they push the image that a certain rapper, a certain singer, is so successful, that people come to believe it. And then they are! That’s also like a magic spell, in many ways.

The chorus of your new song “Run Down Love” goes: “Run down love/ Run down my thighs/ Run down love / cruising tonight.” It seems to be about cruising for sex, the chance sexual encounter in a public place. How do things like chance, serendipity, and randomness play into your process of composing and recording songs?

JWB: This feels like a bit of a cliché, but sometimes when we are recording, the first attempt will sound the absolute best, and you can’t replicate it, and you can’t edit it.

AF: When we’re writing lyrics, sometimes a sentence pops out of nowhere, and then we build a whole song around that. All of these small moments of luck are much more valuable than sitting down with the intention of working with a theme, somehow. And yeah, that song is about cruising, which is, as you said, all about luck: you never know who’s hiding in the bush.

How did you land upon your band’s name? Is it an inversion of “first love?” A play on “first date?”

AF: Thank you bandnamemaker.com.

Really? That’s a bit of randomness.

AF: Most of the things we do are very random. Things don’t have to make sense to begin with.

JWB: You can always give them meaning later.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Karim Kazemi.

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In an ornate room in Georgia’s Capitol, Julie Adams — a member both of the election board serving the state’s most populous county and of a right-wing organization sowing skepticism about American elections — got the news she was waiting for. And she couldn’t wait to share it.

With pink manicured nails that matched her trim pink blazer, she tapped out a message on her phone to a top election lawyer for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee. “Got it passed,” she wrote to Gineen Bresso, photographs reviewed by ProPublica show.

What had passed that September afternoon in Atlanta was a state rule, championed by Adams, that would allow poll watchers like those she’d trained to gain greater access to sensitive areas in counting centers where votes were being tallied. The rule was a priority for supporters of former President Donald Trump who are looking to pave the way to challenge election results if their candidate loses this week’s vote.

The win was one in a string of them for Adams, who quickly ascended from a little-known, financially troubled conservative activist to a surprise appointee to the Fulton County board of elections. Her note to Bresso signaled not just this particular victory but the extent to which the 61-year-old has used her new perch to carry out the efforts of national players seeking to tilt the election in Trump’s favor.

Fulton itself is significant in state and national politics for a host of reasons: its sheer concentration of Democratic voters (380,000 in 2020, more than any other Georgia county), the scrutiny it received from national election skeptics after Trump lost the state by fewer than 12,000 votes — and, now, its newest election board member’s outsize role in trying to influence Georgia’s election processes.

Her actions in her nine months on the Fulton County board have been prodigious. She secretly helped push another, arguably higher-stakes rule through the state election board that vastly expanded the authority of county board members to refuse to certify votes they deem suspicious. She herself refused to certify the results of the presidential primary in March (though the board’s Democratic majority overruled her), and then she sued her board and election director, asserting local officials should be allowed to refuse to certify vote totals if there are discrepancies, which experts say are almost always innocuous. Some of her lawyers in that case work for the America First Policy Institute, an advocacy group staffed with former Trump officials.

So far, Adams’ efforts have mostly failed. Two judges have invalidated rules that Adams backed, with one calling them “illegal, unconstitutional and void.” But other efforts are still underway. The month after joining the Fulton County election board, Adams became regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network, the group founded by lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who joined Trump on a call when he asked Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” him enough votes to overturn the 2020 election results there.

In that role, Adams runs weekly calls for Republican activists who have described Georgia’s voting as rigged, and she has pulled conservative members of local election boards into a loose coalition, many of whom have challenged results in their counties, too. And prominent conservative election lawyers, writers and national groups have used Adams’ push against certification in Georgia as the basis for a national argument.

Adams did not respond to numerous requests for comment or a detailed list of questions. Nor did representatives for the Election Integrity Network.

The Georgia-based group that hired Adams in 2022, Tea Party Patriots Action, has received millions of dollars from organizations closely tied to conservative legal activist and fundraiser Leonard Leo and billionaire Richard Uihlein, tax records show. Uihlein-backed groups launched unsubstantiated attacks on the legitimacy of voter rolls in at least a dozen states after the 2020 election.

A representative for Uihlein did not respond to questions. A representative for Leo would not elaborate on his contributions to organizations that supported Tea Party Patriots.

The true test of Adams’ effectiveness will come on Election Day — and, if the results in Georgia are anywhere near as close and consequential as they were in 2020, in the days and weeks beyond.

“She’s trying to help Trump win or trying to create chaos in the administration of the election in order to cast aspersions on it if he doesn’t win,” said Patrise Perkins-Hooker, who served as chair of the county election board when Adams joined. Perkins-Hooker described Adams’ work as centered on carrying out the agenda of right-wing activists and not making “the elections run smoothly or transparently.”

In response to ProPublica’s questions, the Republican National Committee provided a statement that said: “The Georgia state election board passed commonsense safeguards to secure Georgia's elections. The Trump-Vance Campaign and RNC supported these rules to bring transparency and accountability to the election process.” It also said, “The RNC defended these rules in court against attacks from Kamala and the DNC and will continue to fight against Democrat election interference.”

Back in 2020, Mitchell and others challenging the results across the country had to rely on disorganized groups of Trump supporters who came together at the last minute and were mostly unfamiliar with election systems. Experts now warn about the more pronounced impact that election deniers like Adams will have, given that they have come to occupy positions of power in local election administration. As Trump said at an October rally in North Carolina: “The vote counter is far more important than the candidate.”

“It was universal support for Julie,” said Earl Ferguson, a vice chair of the Fulton County Republicans, who has also filed challenges to voters’ eligibility and repeated debunked conspiracy theories about the reliability of voting machines at election board meetings. (Ferguson does not agree that the points he made about the machines were not valid.) “She is honest and very capable, and very pleasant.”

After Trump lost the 2020 election, Adams and a small group of conservative activists became regular attendees at election board meetings. On a few occasions, she addressed the board during the public comment period, questioning the integrity of the county’s elections and its certification process. But she was much less outspoken than other activists in the group.

“When Adams was appointed, little was known about her connections to election deniers to justify opposition,” said Max Flugrath, spokesperson for Fair Fight, the Georgia-based voting advocacy organization. “Voting rights groups instead focused on opposing candidates with documented anti-voter records.”

Adams had worked in human resources and executive recruiting. Records show she also had experienced major financial setbacks. She’d filed for bankruptcy in 2005, and her mortgage company had auctioned her Cobb County home on the courthouse steps in 2010. A landlord later sued her, and she agreed to pay more than $13,000 in back rent, according to a 2021 consent agreement.

That same year, she trained 32 poll watchers to monitor the 2021 municipal elections. And she told county commissioners that she believed some tally sheets from an audit of the 2020 election had been “falsified.”

In 2022, Tea Party Patriots Action, the politically active arm of one of the largest national Tea Party groups, hired Adams as a field director, paying her about $124,000 a year according to tax filings.

Her hire came at a time when the group was pulling in cash and intensifying its focus on election issues. Groups funded by Leo, who is seen as the architect behind the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, provided the Tea Party group and a related foundation at least $1.1 million between 2020 and 2022, records show, including a 2021 grant related to election integrity. The group also hired Leo’s firm as consultants.

In 2022, Tea Party Patriots Action more than doubled its annual revenue, thanks in part to a $2.5 million grant from Restoration of America — which is backed by Uihlein, the billionaire owner of the packing supplies company Uline. That year, former Trump campaign official Gina Swoboda was a Restoration for America executive director. Restoration has spent the years since Trump lost in 2020 pushing the unfounded idea that discrepancies in voter roll data between the number of votes and the number of ballots cast are evidence of fraud, despite insistence by elected officials from both parties that the claims are baseless.

That year, the Tea Party group added a program to bring in poll watchers and workers in Georgia, records show. And it had Adams in place.

Representatives for the Tea Party group and Restoration of America did not respond to requests for comment. Swoboda did not respond to questions.

Adams has run scores of poll watcher and worker online trainings, with some drawing dozens of people, records reviewed by ProPublica show. In a May training, Adams listed over 10 things that she wants trainees to report, from the serial numbers on voting machines to the names of poll managers. “There’s no such thing as too much documentation,” she said in a recording of a May training. “If something doesn’t feel right to you, you need to write it out.”

At an October training, she told the roughly three dozen attendees, including those joining from out of state, to first report discrepancies to their state GOP and RNC hotlines and then to VoterGA, an organization whose leader has cast doubt on the outcome of the 2020 election. The Republican Party and right-wing organizations plan to use the poll watchers’ reports in post-election litigation, ProPublica has reported.

“VoterGA has an 18-year proven track record of nonpartisan activity,” said co-founder Garland Favorito. “Republicans and Democrats are told to call their own party hotlines for election issues. We have no plans or resources to file any type of speculative litigation in any matter.”

While working for the Tea Party, Adams also led weekly meetings frequented by prominent state activists, RNC officials, GOP county heads, conservative election board members and voter registration challengers, according to records including emails obtained by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and shared with ProPublica.

Agendas included subjects such as “Voter Integrity concerns for 2024 Elections” and warnings like “New York Times Reporter traveling to several counties in Georgia.”

In 2022, Adams had appeared at the Election Integrity Network’s Georgia chapter launch and was described the following year as its state liaison in social media posts by other activists.

But much of her work was done behind the scenes. So when the county GOP nominated her to join the election board in the heavily Democratic Fulton County, commissioners approved the choice 6-0.

After Adams joined the board in February, it did not take long for fellow members to begin worrying about her intentions. The board is made up of four political appointees, two by each party, led by a chair chosen by the Democratic-majority county commission. Traditionally, the board’s primary goal has been to make Fulton elections run smoothly, past and present board members said.

However, Perkins-Hooker, the chair when Adams joined, said that during meetings, she could see Adams receiving text messages from a Republican activist “telling her what to say, and what to do.” After Perkins-Hooker stepped down in April, the new chair banned board members from using phones during meetings.

“She came with a mission to try and paint our elections as being fraught with fraud and incompetency,” said Perkins-Hooker, an opinion echoed by other board members.

Adams had been on the board for just a few weeks when, in March, she was elevated to regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network, the organization that Mitchell, Trump’s lawyer, had launched. The new position put her near the top of the leadership’s organizational chart.

Adams quickly began pushing conservative priorities at election board meetings. She wanted poll watchers to have more access to vote tallies from election machines. And she was very concerned about the mechanics of certifying elections. Though a century of case law says that certification is a mandatory duty for officials like her — whom experts compare to scorekeepers, not referees — Adams began questioning if she had to do it. She demanded reams of information she said that she needed to be certain of the results before certifying.

At Adams’ third meeting, in March, she and the other Republican board member shocked Democratic board members by voting against the certification of the presidential primary election — though the Democratic majority overruled them.

Adams’ push to have power over certification of election results couldn’t succeed under the state’s current rules, so she set out to change them.

To do so, she lobbied to remake the body that determined them, the State Election Board, which at the time was composed of two moderate Republican members, two MAGA-aligned members and a Democrat. She activated the coalition she had been building with the support of national Republicans, inviting them to a March meeting where the goal was to ensure that the moderate Republican on the State Election Board was replaced. “The Georgia House of Representatives needs to take action immediately!!!!” the meeting invitation read, providing the phone number of the speaker of the house.

Not long afterward, the speaker replaced that board member with a conservative media personality whom Trump would soon praise by name at a rally.

The new Trump-backed majority quickly began passing rules that the prior board had criticized as illegal, including one, originally pushed by Adams, expanding the power of county board members to refuse to certify votes they found suspicious. It was passed by the new board along with another rule potentially allowing county board members to delay certification.

A national outcry ensued, with The New York Times calling it “The Republican Plan to Challenge a Harris Victory.”

Three of the nation’s leading conservative election lawyers backed the new rules. A conservative group ran ads targeting swing state election officials that echoed the lawyers’ arguments. And the certification rule Adams pushed became a talking point for conservative media outlets. One article in The Federalist argued that it “could stop leftists from bullying election officials into certifying results without completing their duties.” Lawyers for the Republican National Committee and a Trump-aligned conservative think tank also defended the certification rules in Georgia superior court, testing arguments that certifying election results was optional.

Adams’ arguments that certification is not mandatory inspired David Hancock, a GOP member of Gwinnett County’s election board, to vote against certifying the same presidential primary as Adams. (He described several minor inconsistencies as sufficient reason for him not to certify.) “It was, like, a big deal,” Hancock said of Adams’ decision to vote against certifying.

Because two judges in October invalidated the new rules passed by the State Election Board, the mechanics of the election this week will be the same as before Adams’ pushes to empower poll watchers and county election board members.

But at a combative Fulton County board meeting the week before the election, Adams made clear that she wasn’t going to let the judge’s rulings stop her from continuing her campaign. Despite the county’s lawyer telling her that the certification rule she had pushed had been stayed, she argued that it had actually not been, citing her lawyers. “I’ve learned how the system works — or at least how it was supposed to work,” Adams said. “I’ve learned how sometimes it doesn’t work as the law requires, right here in Fulton County.”

Mollie Simon contributed research and Andy Kroll contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Doug Bock Clark and Heather Vogell.

There’s just one problem: Although EPEAT launched its solar standards in 2019, as of today, there are only six EPEAT-registered solar panels on the global market. And there are currently no EPEAT-registered solar inverters, devices that convert the direct current electricity a solar panel produces to alternating current electricity, which the grid uses. That doesn’t leave a lot of choices for the federal government, or anyone else who wants to purchase sustainably-produced solar equipment.

That’s why, in October, the Department of Energy, or DOE, launched a new prize that offers up to $450,000 to U.S.-based solar panel and inverter manufacturers that achieve EPEAT certification for their products. As a new wave of domestic solar manufacturing kicks into high gear, the DOE hopes the prize will ensure that companies use efficient processes, sustainable materials, fair labor practices, and low-carbon energy.

“The fact of the matter is, not all solar [products] in their production are created equal,” said Patty Dillon, a vice president at the Global Electronics Council, the sustainable technology nonprofit that manages the EPEAT ecolabel.

Solar panels convert the sun’s rays into electricity in a process that emits no greenhouse gases, which makes them essential for fighting climate change. To achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, the International Energy Agency estimates that the world must add 630 gigawatts of new solar power annually by 2030 — up from the 135 gigawatts installed in 2020. 

But some solar panels are more climate-friendly than others. Polysilicon, which is used to make the sunlight-harvesting cells inside silicon panels, is made using an energy-intensive process often powered by fossil fuels. The frames that hold solar panels together are made of aluminum, which is typically smelted in China using coal-powered electricity. The manufacturing processes that turn these materials into a solar panel also require energy, which can lead to more emissions. On a global level, the difference between solar panels manufactured using clean energy and those made with fossil fuels could amount to tens of billions of metric tons of carbon pollution by the middle of the 21st century.

To minimize those emissions, along with other environmental challenges like the use of toxic chemicals and the disposal of solar e-waste, companies must take a hard look at their supply chains and, in some cases, engage in difficult clean-up work. The DOE’s new prize, “Promoting Registration of Inverters and Modules with Ecolabel,” or PRIME, encourages companies to do so by going through the EPEAT registration process.

“EPEAT certification enables companies to show how they have been taking the steps to have more environmentally friendly supply chains and manufacturing processes,” Becca Jones-Albertus, who directs the DOE’s solar energy technologies office, told Grist. 

Solar companies seeking EPEAT registration must meet a list of criteria that span four broad themes: climate change, sustainable resource use, hazardous chemicals, and responsible supply chains. Depending on how many standards a manufacturer meets, it can receive an EPEAT Bronze, Silver, or Gold designation. 

In addition, as of June, solar manufacturers registered with EPEAT are required to meet the industry’s first-ever criteria for embodied carbon, the emissions generated when a product is produced. For each kilowatt of power produced, no more than 630 kilograms of CO2 can be emitted during the production of an EPEAT-registered solar panel. The limit, Dillon says, represents about 25 percent fewer carbon emissions than the global average. Solar panels that fall below the “ultra low carbon” threshold of 400 kilograms of CO2 per kilowatt of power earn a special EPEAT Climate+ designation. 

“That basically represents the best in class,” Dillon said.

It’s difficult to make a direct comparison to fossil fuel plants, since most of their emissions come from operations rather than building infrastructure. But other research has found that over their lifespan, solar plants are considerably more climate friendly, emitting roughly 50 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour of energy produced compared with about 1,000 grams per kilowatt-hour for coal. 

Meeting EPEAT’s requirements isn’t easy, which might explain why there are only two companies — QCells and the Arizona-based First Solar — currently listed on the registry. And only two solar panels manufactured by First Solar have earned the ecolabel’s Climate+ badge. QCells, which manufactures two EPEAT-registered panels at a factory in Dalton, Georgia, spent about two years going through a “very extensive” certification process that involved collecting data across its supply chain and submitting to a third-party audit, corporate communications lead Debra DeShong told Grist.

“It’s not an easy task,” DeShong said. “It requires resources and it requires a will.”

Other companies may now be motivated to try. QCells’ additions to the EPEAT registry in June activated the Federal Acquisition Regulation, which requires the federal government to purchase goods that meet standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, except in limited circumstances where it’s impractical to do so. In the case of solar panels, that means EPEAT-registered products. The DOE’s PRIME Prize, which provides U.S. solar manufacturers $50,000 for starting the registration process and up to $100,000 per product for up to four products that complete it, offers additional incentive. Jones-Albertus told Grist that the prize was designed to “roughly offset the cost of collecting all the data and moving through the registration process.”

Solar companies “told us that they’re interested in EPEAT certification, but they haven’t gotten there yet,” Jones-Albertus said. “We’re hoping to provide incentives so that companies go through the EPEAT registration process sooner.”

Companies peering deep into their supply chains for the first time might discover they have to make some changes to meet EPEAT registration requirements. To slim down the carbon footprint of its panels, a solar manufacturer might have to switch to a low-carbon polysilicon supplier. (QCells, for instance, is purchasing polysilicon from a facility in Washington state that produces the stuff using hydropower.) Or it might decide to swap out virgin aluminum frames manufactured overseas for recycled steel ones built domestically by Origami Solar, a change that can reduce carbon emissions tied to the frame by upwards of 90 percent. To meet EPEAT’s optional recycled content criteria, a manufacturer could decide to start purchasing recycled panel glass from a company like SolarCycle. 

Making these sorts of manufacturing supply chain alterations takes time and money beyond what the new DOE prize will provide. But Dillon, of the Global Electronics Council, is optimistic that more companies will start registering their products with EPEAT now that federal purchasers require it.

Erik Petersen, the chief strategy officer at Origami Solar, believes the Biden administration’s push for clean domestic manufacturing, combined with growing consumer interest in supply chain transparency, will spur more U.S. solar companies to ensure their products meet high sustainability standards.  

“What’s exciting is all of these forces are coming together at the same time,” Petersen told Grist. “That really gives the industry an incentive to do the right things.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Department of Energy wants to pay companies to make greener solar panels on Nov 1, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Maddie Stone.

Faced with plummeting birth rates, nationwide kindergarten closures and young people who are increasingly choosing to stay single, authorities in China have announced incentives to encourage people to have kids, calling for “a new marriage and childbearing culture.”

China’s cabinet, the State Council, published a slew of measures on Monday, including childbirth subsidies, better healthcare for mothers and children, and comprehensive childcare services.

Officials at all levels of government should “actively build a new marriage and childbearing culture and carry forward the traditional virtues of the Chinese nation, advocating ... marriage and childbearing at the right age,” the announcement said.

Communist Party leader Xi Jinping has called on women to focus on raising families, and the National People’s Congress has been looking at ways to boost flagging birth rates and kick-start the shrinking population, including flexible working policies, coverage for fertility treatment and extended maternity leave.

But young women in today’s China are increasingly choosing not to marry or have kids, citing huge inequalities and patriarchal attitudes that still run through family life, not to mention the sheer economic cost of raising a family.

Officials should “vigorously promote positive views of marriage, relationships, childbearing, and family" and build online matchmaking and dating services to help young people to find partners, while getting rid of “lavish weddings and high bride prices,” the State Council directive said.

The measures come after the Ministry of Education reported a 5% fall in the number of kindergartens last year, with more than 14,800 closures, marking the second year of decline.

Kindergarten enrollments fell by 5.35 million in 2023, a decrease of 11.55% from 2022, the ministry said in figures widely reported by Chinese media.

Live births fell from 17.86 million in 2016 to just 9.02 million in 2023, with birth rates plummeting from 1.77 per woman in 2016 to around 1.0 in 2023, placing the country second from bottom among the world’s major economies.

Global trend

Peng Xiujian, a senior researcher at Australia’s Victoria University, said low fertility rates are part of a global trend, especially in Asia, where young people are generally unwilling to have children.

The new measures “will be slow to take effect, and it is impossible to change people’s willingness to have children all at once,” Peng said.

The State Council said it would extend maternity leave from 98 days to 158 days, which would attract a maternity allowance in more than half of China’s provinces, and allow childcare tax allowances of up to 2,000 yuan (US$280) a month, while calling on local governments to expand and subsidize local childcare services.

But Peng said there are still huge barriers for women in the workplace who want to have families, and that issues like discrimination, flexible working and a working culture that is heavily focused on long hours would need to be addressed first.

Jessica Nisén, a demographer at the University of Turku in Finland, said the latest measures would be “very good” for couples who already have children or who have already decided they want them.

But she added, “building a new marriage and childbearing culture will surely be difficult though,” calling for more radical policies offering the same amount of leave to each parent to encourage shared responsibility.

She said the measures could have a “non-marginal” effect in the long term, but said the government needs to demonstrate it is committed to gender equality rather than just setting top-down targets for how many children should be born.

A millennial who declined to be named for fear of reprisals said that women’s rights in the workplace, affordable medical care and the cost of educating a child all need to be taken into account before more women will even consider having kids.

“The subsidies China is offering right now wouldn’t even make up one-tenth of the total cost of educating a child,” she said. “Perhaps if they covered all of the costs of prenatal checkups and childbirth, it would look as if they were a bit more serious about this.”

Recovery unlikely

Tomáš Sobotka, deputy director of the Vienna Institute of Demography, said the long-term recovery of birth rates looked unlikely in the current economic climate, citing high youth unemployment and “competitive or uncertain labor market prospects for many.”

He said ideological slogans like “a new marriage and childbearing culture” would have little practical effect and could even have the opposite effect.

“Government efforts in trying to exhort younger generations to form a family may meet with resistance from the young people who are alienated by their poor future prospects,” Sobotka told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview.

He said universal benefits like cheap childcare weren’t outlined in the policy, yet tax breaks would only be an incentive for more affluent couples.

“The new policies do not manage to address the broader perception of uncertainty, pressures, and lack of confidence about the future among the young generations today, which are driven by a mix of past experiences (such as COVID lockdowns and uncertainties), ... unaffordable housing in large cities, miserable labor market prospects, and the economic squeeze that is hitting young adults the most,” he said.

“Until these issues are at least partly addressed, birth rates will not recover much.”

Martin Whyte, professor emeritus of sociology at Harvard University, said the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s claim to legitimacy as a government has been undermined by the falling birth rates.

“There was a general assumption that the party and state in China were managing society quite well and successfully, and that the Chinese people were benefiting from that,” Whyte told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview. “And now, I think it’s likely that, if there’s some new campaigns or whatever, people are much more likely to be skeptical or even critical.”

He said the campaigns to create a “new childbearing culture” could also backfire.

“Some of these things Xi Jinping claimed, such as to find ways for women to have more babies, are clearly creating derision in China,” he said. “Young people and women, in particular, think this is absurd, and that Xi Jinping is completely out of touch with reality.”

“The society Chinese are living under does not produce a situation in which it would make sense to have three babies,” Whyte said, adding that the coercive nature of Xi’s three-year zero-COVID policy had undermined his legitimacy in the eyes of many in China.

“[There are] also other things like the housing sector crisis,” he said. “China produced incentives for local governments and developers to build a lot more housing than was actually needed. And then with population shrinking… where is the competence of the party-state in allowing that to happen?”

‘A very different place’

Alicja Bachulska, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, agreed.

“I would say ... in 2023 we have felt a lot of frustration, a lot of disillusionment,” she said in a YouTube debate with Bonnie Glaser of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “[The] Chinese authorities [are] making quite arbitrary decisions that are not perceived any more in some circles as very rational.”

“I think that the end of the zero-COVD policy, the street protests that took place in China at the end of 2022 made many people realize that the level of frustration related to the way Chinese political elites operate at the moment had started to be really, really big,” she said.

This also has an effect on Beijing’s attempts to boost the birth rate, Bachulska said.

“For China, the solution is to convince most young women in China, well-educated middle class urban women, to have more children, and they are really trying hard to build this positive energy idea of how the demographic crisis in China will be turned into an opportunity,” she said. “But then on the other hand you have a huge crackdown on the feminist movement.”

She said women in China are in “a very different place” despite being unable to organize, and were unlikely to go along with the authorities' campaign for more children.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Lucie Lo for RFA Mandarin.

The Wall Street Journal (10/1/24) describes an Iranian missile barrage as a response to “Israel’s restraint”—rather than as a response to an Israeli terrorist bombing in Tehran, which went unmentioned in the editorial.

The media hawks are flying high, pushing out bellicose rhetoric on the op-ed pages that seems calculated to whip the public into a war-ready frenzy.

Just as they have done with Hezbollah (FAIR.org, 10/10/24), prominent conservative media opinionators misrepresent Iran as the aggressor against an Israel that practices admirable restraint.

Under the headline, “Iran Opens the Door to Retaliation,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board (10/1/24) wrote that Iran’s October 1 operation against Israel “warrants a response targeting Iran’s military and nuclear assets. This is Iran’s second missile barrage since April, and no country can let this become a new normal.”

The editors wrote:

After April’s attack, the Biden administration pressured Israel for a token response, and President Biden said Israel should “take the win” since there was no great harm to Israel. Israel’s restraint has now yielded this escalation, and it is under no obligation to restrain its retaliation this time.

‘We need to escalate’

“Bully regimes respond to the stick,” Bret Stephens (New York Times, 10/1/24) declared—citing the fact that Iran was reluctant to make a nuclear deal with the United States after the United States unilaterally abrogated the last deal.

The New York Times‘ self-described “warmongering neocon” columnist Bret Stephens (10/1/24), in a piece headlined “We Absolutely Need to Escalate in Iran,” similarly filed Iran’s April and October strikes on Israel under “aggression” that requires a US/Israeli military “response.” And a Boston Globe editorial (10/3/24) wrote that Iran “launched a brazen attack,” arguing that the incident illustrated why US students are wrong to oppose American firms making or investing in Israeli weapons.

All of these pieces conveniently neglected to mention that Iran announced that its October 1 missile barrage was “a response to Israel’s recent assassinations of leaders of [Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], Hezbollah and Hamas” (Responsible Statecraft, 10/1/24). One of these assassinations was carried out by a bombing in Tehran, the Iranian capital. But we can only guess as to whether the Globe thinks those killings are “brazen,” Stephens thinks they qualify as “aggression,” or if the Journal believes any country can let such assassinations “become a new normal.”

Likewise, Iran’s April strikes came after Israel’s attack on an Iranian consulate in Damascus that killed seven Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers (CBS, 4/14/24). At the time, Iran reportedly said that it would refrain from striking back against Israel if the latter agreed to end its mass murder campaign in Gaza (Responsible Statecraft, 4/8/24).

‘Axis of Aggression’

Bret Stephens (New York Times, 10/8/24) thinks we’d be safer if “cunning and aggressive dictatorships…finally learned the taste of defeat.”

A second Stephens piece (New York Times, 10/8/24) claimed that “the American people had better hope Israel wins” in its war against “the Axis of Aggression led from Tehran.” The latter is his term for the coalition of forces resisting the US and Israel from Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon and Iran, which refers to itself as the “axis of resistance.” Stephens’ reasoning is that, since Iran’s 1979 revolution, the country

has meant suffering for thousands of Americans: the hostages at the US embassy in Tehran; the diplomats and Marines in Beirut; the troops around Baghdad and Basra, killed by munitions built in Iran and supplied to proxies in Iraq; the American citizens routinely taken as prisoners in Iran; the Navy SEALs who perished in January trying to stop Iran from supplying Houthis with weapons used against commercial shipping.

The war Israelis are fighting now—the one the news media often mislabels the “Gaza war,” but is really between Israel and Iran—is fundamentally America’s war, too: a war against a shared enemy; an enemy that makes common cause with our totalitarian adversaries in Moscow and Beijing; an enemy that has been attacking us for 45 years. Americans should consider ourselves fortunate that Israel is bearing the brunt of the fighting; the least we can do is root for it.

This depiction of Iran as an aggressor that has victimized the United States for 45 years, causing “suffering for thousands of Americans,” is a parody of history. The fact is that the US has imposed suffering on millions of Iranians for 71 years, starting with the overthrow of the country’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. It propped up the brutal Pahlavi dictatorship until 1979, then backed Iraq’s invasion of Iran, helping Saddam Hussein use chemical weapons against Iranians (Foreign Policy, 8/26/13). It imposes murderous sanctions on Iran to this day (Canadian Dimension, 4/3/23).

Given this background, suggesting—as the Journal, the Globe and Stephens do—that Iran is the aggressor against the US is not only untenable but laughable. Furthermore, as I’ve previously shown (FAIR.org, 1/21/20), it’s hardly a settled fact that Iran is responsible for Iraqi attacks on US occupation forces in the country. Stephens’ description of the Navy SEALs who died in the Red Sea is vague enough that one might be left with the impression that Iran or Ansar Allah killed them, but the SEALs died when one of them fell overboard and the other jumped into the water to try to save him (BBC, 1/22/24).

Stephens went on:

Those who care about the future of freedom had better hope Israel wins.

We are living in a world that increasingly resembles the 1930s, when cunning and aggressive dictatorships united against debilitated, inward-looking, risk-averse democracies. Today’s dictatorships also know how to smell weakness. We would all be safer if, in the Middle East, they finally learned the taste of defeat.

What Stephens is deploying here is the tired and baseless propaganda strategy of hinting that World War II redux is impending if America doesn’t crush the Third World bad guy of the moment. More realistically, the “future of freedom” is jeopardized by the US/Israeli alliance’s invading the lands of Palestinian and Lebanese people and massacring them. These crimes suggest that, in the Journal’s parlance, it’s the US/Israeli partnership that is the “regional and global menace.” Or, to borrow another phrase from the Journal’s editorial, it’s Israel and the US who are the “dangerous regime[s]” from which “the civilized world” must be defended.

‘A global menace’

“Iran launched a brazen attack,” the Boston Globe (10/3/24) editorialized—brazenly ignoring Israeli violence toward Iran.

Corporate media commentators didn’t stop at Iran’s direct strikes on Israel, casting Iran as, in the Journal‘s words (10/1/24), “a regional and global menace”:

It started this war via Hamas, which it funds, arms and trains to carry out massacres like the one on October 7, and it escalated via Hezbollah, spreading war to Lebanon. Other proxies destabilize Iraq and Yemen, fire on Israeli and US troops and block global shipping. It sends drones and missiles to Russia and rains ballistic missiles on Israel. All while seeking nukes.

Stephens’ column (10/1/24) similarly argued that “Iran presents an utterly intolerable threat not only to Israel but also to the United States and whatever remains of the liberal international order we’re supposed to lead.” The Globe editorial (10/3/24) wrote that “the threat posed by Iran extends beyond Israel’s borders.” Both cited the Houthis in Yemen, among other alleged Iranian “proxies.”

Painting Iran as the mastermind behind unprovoked worldwide aggression helps prop up the hawks’ demands for escalation. But the US State Department said there was “no direct evidence” that Iran was involved in the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel, “either in planning it or carrying it out” (NBC, 10/12/23).

As FAIR has shown repeatedly (e.g., FAIR.org, 4/21/21, 8/26/20), it isn’t true that Hezbollah is an Iranian puppet. The Houthis, formally known as Ansar Allah, likewise aren’t mere proxies (Democracy Now!, 2/1/24)—and don’t expect the media hawks to tell you that the Houthis began attacking ships they understand to be Israel-linked in response to the US/Israeli assault on Gaza, and say that they will stop if the US/Israeli war crimes in Gaza end.

Moreover, it’s clear that the Journal has no problem with US arms exports, including when they are used to carry out atrocities against civilians, so its posturing about the harm done by Iranian arms sales to Russia cannot be taken seriously (FAIR.org, 1/27/23).

Propaganda goes nuclear

Uriel Hellman (LA Times, 10/17/24) writes that “the responsible nations of the world have tried myriad methods to thwart this doomsday scenario” of Iran making a nuclear weapon, including “negotiated agreements.” The US has tried making deals with Iran, it’s tried violating those deals—nothing seems to work!

As usual, those who are itching for a war on Iran invoke the specter of an Iranian nuclear weapon. Stephens (New York Times, 10/1/24) wrote:

This year, Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that Iran was within a week or two of being able to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb. Even with the requisite fissile material, it takes time and expertise to fashion a nuclear weapon, particularly one small enough to be delivered by a missile. But a prime goal for Iran’s nuclear ambitions is plainly in sight, especially if it receives technical help from its new best friends in Russia, China and North Korea.

Now’s the time for someone to do something about it.

That someone will probably be Israel.

By “something,” Stephens said he also meant that “Biden should order” military strikes to destroy the “Isfahan missile complex.” “There is a uranium enrichment site near Isfahan, too,” Stephens wrote suggestively.

The LA Times published two guest op-eds in less than two weeks urging attacks on Iran based on its alleged nuclear threat. Yossi Klein Halevi (10/7/24) wrote:

Today, Iran sits at the nuclear threshold…. The culminating moment of this war to restore Israeli deterrence against existential threat will be preventing Iran’s nuclear breakout.

Ten days later, Uriel Heilman (LA Times, 10/17/24) argued: “With Iran’s belligerence in overdrive, the US and its allies should seriously consider a military option to take out Iran’s nuclear sites.”

The first question posed by CBS‘s Margaret Brennan in the vice presidential debate (10/1/24)—”would you support or oppose a preemptive strike by Israel on Iran?”—was premised on the claim that Iran “has drastically reduced the time it would take to develop a nuclear weapon. It is down now to one or two weeks time.”

‘Threshold’ is a ways away

If this New York Times piece (10/2/24) seems to have a different, less alarmist tone than other corporate media reports, perhaps that’s because its author, William Broad, is a science reporter and not someone whose beat is foreign policy.

Readers who aren’t versed in the technical terms used to discuss nuclear proliferation can be forgiven for thinking that a country at “the nuclear threshold” is mere days away from being able to use nuclear weapons against their enemies, as these media warnings seem to suggest. But in reality, as the blog War on the Rocks (5/3/24) explained:

Three distinct elements distinguish a state that has achieved a threshold status. First, the conscious pursuit of this combined technical, military and organizational capability to rapidly (probably within three to six months) obtain a rudimentary nuclear explosive capability after a decision to proceed. Second, implementation of a strategy for achieving and utilizing this status. And third, the application of this status for gain vis-à-vis adversaries, allies and/or domestic audiences. Nevertheless, a threshold state remains sufficiently short of weapons possession and even from the capacity to assemble disparate components into a nuclear weapon within days.

According to a Congressional Research Service document (3/20/24) published in March, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reports “suggest that Iran does not yet have a viable nuclear weapon design or a suitable explosive detonation system.”

Estimates of how long it would take for Iran to develop nuclear weapons vary. US intelligence said that Iran could enrich enough uranium for three nuclear devices within weeks if it chose to do so (Congressional Research Service, 9/6/24). Yet as noted by Houston G. Wood, an emeritus professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering who specializes in atomic centrifuges and other nuclear issues, it “would take Iran up to a year to devise a weapon once it had enough nuclear fuel” (New York Times, 10/2/24).

Siegfried S. Hecker, former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory, likewise told the New York Times that “it would likely take many months” for Iran to develop nukes, “not weeks.” As the Times noted, CBS‘s question in the vice presidential debate “conflated the time it would most likely take Iran to manufacture a bomb’s worth of highly enriched uranium with the overall process of turning it into a weapon. ”

What’s more, US intelligence continues to say that Iran “is not currently undertaking nuclear weapons-related activities” (Congressional Research Service, 9/6/24). In 2003, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa against building nuclear weapons that has not yet been rescinded (FAIR.org, 10/17/17).

‘Iran won’t stop itself’

“Iran is implementing its nuclear-related commitments,” the IAEA (3/5/18) said in March 2018. Two months later, the same could not be said to the United States.

Even if Iran were pursuing nuclear weapons, nothing under international law supports the idea that Israel and the US therefore have the right to attack Iran. India would not have been within its rights to attack Pakistan to prevent its rival from building a nuclear weapon.

But media assume different rules apply to Iran. The editors of the Wall Street Journal (10/1/24) contended:

If there were ever cause to target Iran’s nuclear facilities, [Iran’s October attack on Israel] is it…. Iran is closer than ever to a nuclear weapon and won’t stop itself. The question for American and Israeli leaders is: If not now, when?

Recent history shows that Iran has been willing to “stop itself” from acquiring nuclear weapons. Iran abided by the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), popularly known as the Iran nuclear deal, under which Iran limited its nuclear development in exchange for a partial easing of US sanctions. It stuck to the deal for some time even after the United States unilaterally abandoned it.

Just before President Donald Trump ripped up the agreement in 2018, the IAEA reported that Iran was “implementing its nuclear-related commitments” under the accord. The year after the US abrogated the agreement, Iran was still keeping up its end of the bargain.

‘Provocative actions’ from US/Israel

Responsible Statecraft (5/7/24): “Relations between the United States and Iran have been so damaged by Trump’s withdrawal that it does not appear as though the deal can be resurrected.”

Iran subsequently stopped adhering to the by then nonexistent deal—often advancing its nuclear program, as Responsible Statecraft (5/7/24) noted, “in response to provocative actions from the US and Israel”:

In early 2020, the Trump administration killed Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani, leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and soon after Tehran announced that it would no longer abide by its enrichment commitments under the deal. But, even so, Tehran said it would return to compliance if the other parties did so and met their commitments on sanctions relief.

In late 2020, Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated near Tehran, reportedly by Israel. Soon after, Iran’s Guardian Council approved a law to speed up the nuclear program by enriching uranium to 20%, increasing the rate of production, installing new centrifuges, suspending implementation of expanded safeguards agreements, and reducing monitoring and verification cooperation with the IAEA. The Agency has been unable to adequately monitor Iran’s nuclear activities under the deal since early 2021.

However, situating Iranian policies in relation to US/Israeli actions like these would get in the way of the Journal’s campaign, which it articulated in another editorial (10/2/24), to convince the public that “If Mr. Biden won’t take this opportunity to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, the least he can do is not stop Israel from doing the job for its own self-preservation.”

Of course, the crucial, unstated assumption in the articles by Stephens, Halevi, Heilman and the Journal’s editors is that Iran’s hypothetical nuclear weapons are emergencies that need to be immediately addressed by bombing the country—while Washington and Tel Aviv’s vast, actually existing nuclear arsenals warrant no concern.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Gregory Shupak.

But Hurricane Helene, which follows last year’s Hurricane Idalia and last month’s Hurricane Debby, is no ordinary storm, even by Florida’s standards. Like other high-profile climate-fueled storms of the last few years, it’s expected to undergo what meteorologists call “rapid intensification,” gaining strength at a phenomenal pace as it passes through the exceptionally warm waters of the Gulf. As a result, it’s poised to make landfall as a Category 3 or 4 storm just days after first forming in the Caribbean. It has also ballooned to become one of the widest storms on record, which will allow it to bring life-threatening winds and rain as far inland as Tennessee.

Hope Webb, a real estate broker who lives in a beachfront area of the state’s sparsely populated Big Bend region, said on Thursday that she was hunkering down and hoping for the best as the storm was projected to make landfall that evening.

“I am a lifelong resident of this area,” she told Grist. “I’ve weathered many a storm. I have faith God has his arms around us. But this storm is definitely testing our strength.”

Three factors conspired to make Helene a particularly potent storm. Like any hurricane, its fuel is warm ocean water, which injects energy into the atmosphere as it evaporates. As Helene moved through the Caribbean Sea, it fed on exceptionally warm ocean temperatures made at least 300 times more likely by climate change, according to experts. As it continued its march north to the Gulf Coast, it gathered strength from water that’s both unusually warm and deep — a great big pool of high-octane fuel. 

In addition, the region’s wind shear — a term referring to the tendency of winds to move in varied directions and speeds at different elevations — has been low. That atmospheric messiness would typically put a lower ceiling on a hurricane’s strength. Finally, high humidity has been another ingredient working in Helene’s favor.

“It has had near perfect conditions,” said Karthik Balaguru, a climate scientist who studies hurricanes at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. 

The combination of warm and deep ocean fuel, high humidity, and low wind shear have put Hurricane Helene on the cusp of rapid intensification, which technically refers to an increase in sustained wind speeds by at least 35 miles per hour within 24 hours. Scientists have found a dramatic increase in the number of rapid intensifications close to shore in recent decades.

“The distinct signal of climate change is that it increases the proportion of intense hurricanes,” Balaguru said. “Storms tend to intensify faster, more quickly, and especially close to the coast.”

That’s making hurricanes more dangerous than ever. For one, a coastal city might be preparing for an approaching Category 1 hurricane, only for it to suddenly morph into a Category 3. Well beyond the coast, the more powerful a hurricane is, the better it can resist dissipating as it moves over land and loses its source of fuel. And as the atmosphere warms, it can also hold more moisture, so hurricanes can dump more rainfall. 

For communities on the coastline, what makes a storm like Helene so dangerous isn’t just the winds and rainfall, but also the storm surge. A hurricane’s winds bulldoze water ashore — a perilous outcome for a region like the Gulf Coast, which is already experiencing sea-level rise. 

The geography of Florida’s west coast makes things all the worse. While the ocean depths of some beach regions drop precipitously right off the coast, here the depths increase gradually as you move away from shore. If the water near shore were deeper, a storm surge could partly be absorbed by these depths, attenuating its impact on land. But with such shallow water off of Florida, the water has nowhere to go but straight into coastal communities. 

Even though the eye of Helene is projected to make landfall Thursday night around Tallahassee, a hurricane’s strongest winds tend to blow in the northeast part of the storm. For Helene, those winds are poised to hit Florida’s less-developed Big Bend region, which also suffered the worst impacts from Idalia last year. That part of the state is extremely low-lying, so the storm surge could rush inland unimpeded by the kind of geographic features that would normally be mitigating factors. The projected surge could reach as high as 20 feet in towns like Steinhatchee, just south of where Hope Webb is riding out the storm at her beachfront home. In an announcement Wednesday night, the National Weather Service office in Tallahassee called these conditions “catastrophic” “potentially unsurvivable.”

Farther south, the populous Tampa Bay region is also poised to see record surge figures after decades of near misses. “Just the shape of that coastline in that area, it definitely makes it unfortunately easier for that storm surge to pile up,” said Samantha Nebylitsa, who studies hurricanes at the University of Miami. “It sort of funnels into Tampa Bay, and so there’s really nowhere for the water to go but into that area.” In many cases, estimates suggest that Hurricane Helene is set to break surge records by more than 2 feet.

As of early Thursday, the storm was still hours away from passing over St. Petersburg, but winds had already begun to pick up and the sky was darkening. Several gas stations in the city’s downtown ran out of fuel as residents filled up their tanks, and most people in low-lying areas had fortified their homes against flooding with sandbags, tarps, or door sealants. Flashing signs that read “HIGH WATER EXPECTED” warned drivers to stay away from the coastline. Counties all the way down the Gulf Coast, including those that include the cities of Tampa and St. Petersburg, had issued mandatory evacuations for residents in storm surge zones and those who live in mobile and manufactured homes. Streets in the beach city of Clearwater were already seeing local flooding.

Hurricane Helene is a massive storm — its wind field is more than 400 miles across — so its rain will fall from the coastlines of Georgia and the Carolinas clear across to Missouri and Arkansas. As of early Thursday, every county in South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee was under some kind of flood or wind warning. Forecasters are warning of flash flooding, especially in the mountainous regions east of Knoxville and Chattanooga, Tennessee, as the storm stalls, and of dangerous wind that could cause widespread power outages through Georgia. 

Like a car accelerating to a higher speed, Hurricane Helene can coast farther inland without running out of momentum, given just how much speed it has picked up as it has passed through the extra-hot Gulf waters.

“It’ll essentially just slingshot itself into those states,” said Nebylitsa. “And with that speed, it’ll take a lot more for it to slow down.” 

All these regions, whether coastal or inland, have substantial development that is uniquely vulnerable to flooding. The Florida coast contains thousands of homes on low-lying coastal land that is easy prey for storm surge, and states such as Georgia and North Carolina have built thousands of homes near rivers and streams that are likely to flood when Helene passes over. As intense hurricanes like Helene get more frequent, they’re exposing these vulnerabilities.

“We’re entering this new normal of what we’re going to be experiencing under climate change,” said Michelle Meyer, director of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University. “But second to that, what’s been going on for a long time is that we continue to build in really risky places, in ways that are also pretty risky. So if we continue adding and adding more homes in areas that are going to flood regularly, or adding more homes on the coast without requiring greater mitigation, we’re going to continue seeing higher and higher dangers.”

Ayurella Horn-Muller contributed reporting to this article.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The ‘perfect’ conditions that could make Hurricane Helene ‘unsurvivable’ on Sep 26, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

But the claim is false. Keyword searches found no official statements or credible reports that back the claim. Experts dismissed the claim, saying there is little to gain for Kim in making such a statement.

The claim was shared in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Aug. 3, 2024, by a user called “SprinterFamily” who has previously spread false information about North Korea.

The post cited Kim as saying: “We will always stand by Iran and will respond decisively to any threat to our ally. We warn the mercenary of global imperialism, namely Israel, not to make mistakes.”

The claim began to circulate amid growing fears of a regional war in the Middle East. 

The nearly 10-month-old war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas has led to regular low-level hostilities between Israel and Iran and Hezbollah, as well as other groups in the region that are aligned with Tehran.

But after the killing of the top leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah in July, Iran and Hezbollah pledged to retaliate, with media reports saying they may attack Israel. 

North Korea has been a strategic partner of long standing for Iran, based on their subjection to extensive U.S. economic sanctions and other U.S. policies designed to counter the threats they pose to key U.S. partners. 

There have been media reports that North Korean-made weapons have been supplied to Palestinian militant groups such as Hamas through Iran. 

Some believe North Korea is indirectly involved in the conflicts in the Middle East, although it has never officially acknowledged or commented on any military support.

But the claim about the North Korean leader’s threat against Israel is false. 

A review of North Korea’s state-run media outlets, which often carry statements from Kim, found no such statement or report. 

‘Little to gain for Kim’

Harry Kazianis, senior director at the Center for the National Interest think tank, believes that if the statement was not recorded by North Korea’s official news agency, it should be assumed that the claim is false.

Kazianis said North Korea had “other ways” to cause trouble for Israel, including sales of missile technology to Iran that could be used against Israel, citing U.S. and South Korean intelligence agencies.

Makino Yoshihiro, a visiting professor at Hiroshima University and diplomatic correspondent for Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun, said there would be little to gain for Kim in making such a statement.

“Iran is currently trying not to overly provoke the United States, and North Korea’s involvement would create confusion,” said Yoshihiro. 

Bruce Bennett, a senior researcher at the RAND Corporation, believes the claim about Kim’s statement on Israel may have originated from China or Russia, citing Russia’s attempts to build an anti-Western coalition.

“Given that there was an attack in Iran that killed a major Hamas leader, and Kim Jong Un did nothing, it suggests that if he was really threatening to confront Israel, something would have already happened,” Bennett said, adding that Kim’s threats are primarily for propaganda purposes and are unlikely to be carried out in practice.

Translated by Dukin Han. Edited by Taejun Kang.

 Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Dukin Han for RFA Korean.

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A year ago, sheriff’s deputies in Georgia showed up on the doorstep of middle school student Colt Gray. They were there to question him about an online threat to shoot up his school. Last week, the 14-year-old was charged with shooting and killing four people at Apalachee High School.

As details continue to emerge, the question now in front of Georgia legislators is: How should officials respond to these kinds of warning signs in the future?

Lawmakers are already indicating that they intend to take tougher action against students who make threats. In a Sept. 12 letter to members of the state House Republican Caucus, House Speaker Jon Burns wrote that one of his objectives in the next legislative session will be to “increase penalties for making terroristic threats in our schools — and make it clear that here in Georgia, threats of violence against our students will not be tolerated and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” (Burns did not respond to a request for comment.)

But, as ProPublica has reported this year, there can be consequences to increasing penalties: trampling the rights of children who don’t pose a threat to anyone.

Two weeks before the Apalachee shooting, we published a story about a 10-year-old in Tennessee who was expelled from school for a year after he angrily pointed his finger in the shape of a gun. The article explored how a state law, passed in response to last year’s Covenant School shooting in Nashville that left six people dead, requires schools to kick students out for making threats of mass violence.

Another Tennessee law went into effect in July that increases the charge for making a threat of mass violence from a misdemeanor to a felony — without requiring officials to take actual intent into account. Many experts and some officials consider both laws an overreach.

There is no indication that the Tennessee 10-year-old whose case we examined posed a danger to his school or his community. The fifth grader had no access to a firearm, according to his mother. She said school officials described him as a good kid and expressed regret at having to expel him. (The assistant director of his school district declined to comment, even after his mother signed a form permitting school officials to do so.)

Meanwhile, Georgia law enforcement officials were warned a year ago that Gray was making threats, and they heard directly from his father that the teenager had access to guns. (School officials said the warnings were never passed on to them.)

As Georgia lawmakers consider what they can do to keep students safer, experts say they should consider the implications their decisions may have for a broad spectrum of children — from the 14-year-old with access to assault rifles to the 10-year-old pointing a finger gun. People who study the warning signs of and legislative reactions to school shootings have long warned that zero-tolerance policies, such as the ones Tennessee adopted, are not proven to make schools safer — and in fact can harm students.

To deter violence, experts maintain, the research suggests that the most effective strategy is not mandatory expulsions and felony charges but a different kind of tactic, one that federal officials have touted based on decades of interviews with mass shooters, political assassins and people who survived attacks. Threat assessments, when done effectively, bring together mental health professionals, law enforcement and others in the community to help school officials sort out the credible threats from the simply disruptive acts and provide students with needed help.

“It is the best option available for us to prevent these kinds of shootings,” said Dewey Cornell, a psychologist and a leading expert on the use of threat assessments in schools. A threat assessment team is supposed to interview anyone involved with a threat to assess whether the student poses an imminent risk to others. And it is supposed to warn any intended victims of major threats, take precautions to protect them and seek ways to resolve conflict.

Cornell said law enforcement involvement and harsh discipline should be reserved for the most serious cases — the exact opposite of zero-tolerance policies. Tennessee, along with 20 other states, requires threat assessments in schools. But because the state also mandates expulsions and felony charges, many students end up ostracized and isolated rather than getting the ongoing help that experts consider to be one of the greatest strengths of the threat assessment process.

The suggestion that schools and authorities should closely monitor and assist students who make threats may feel counterintuitive, especially with fear and frustration soaring, said Mark Follman, a journalist with Mother Jones and author of the 2022 book “Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America.”

It’s also easy to understand why people want a punitive response to threats, Follman said, but it can make the problem worse. Expelling a student who is potentially dangerous means school officials and others have little ability to monitor them. And, crucially, “you’re also potentially exacerbating their sense of crisis, their grievance, especially if it involves the school,” he said, moving them toward a point of attack instead of away from it.

For his book, Follman interviewed leading experts on threat assessments and embedded with a team at a school district in Oregon. He points out that for the threat assessment process to work, it has to be carried out correctly. “Most, if not all, examples I have seen of stories about threat assessment having negative impact on students and families are cases in which it’s not being done right,” Follman said.

Tennessee school officials carry out threat assessments inconsistently, our story last month found. Some allow police to take the lead in minor incidents, resulting in criminal charges for kids who made threats that school officials themselves did not consider credible.

At least one Tennessee lawmaker is responding to the shooting in Georgia by saying it validates the harsh penalties for students who make threats. Tennessee state Sen. Jon Lundberg, who co-sponsored both punitive Tennessee laws, told the Chattanooga Times Free Press this week, “The legislature is constantly looking at, What else can we do?”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Aliyya Swaby.

The signatories urged the Departments of State and Treasury to prioritize the effective use of Global Magnitsky sanctions, a human rights and anticorruption accountability tool that authorizes sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act.

Read the full letter here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Janine Jackson interviewed North Central College‘s Steve Macek about “dark money” campaign contributions  for the August 23, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: If you use the word “democracy” unsarcastically, you likely think it has something to do with, not only every person living in a society having some say in the laws and policies that govern them, but also the idea that everyone should be able to know what’s going on, besides voting, that influences that critical decision-making.

“Dark money,” as it’s called, has become, in practical terms, business as usual, but it still represents the opposite of that transparency, that ability for even the unpowerful to know what’s happening, to know what’s affecting the rules that govern our lives. A press corps concerned with defending democracy, and not merely narrating the nightmare of crisis, would be talking about that every day, in every way.

Our guest has written about the gap between what we need and what we get, in terms of media. Steve Macek is professor and chair of communication and media studies, at North Central College in Illinois, a co-coordinator of Project Censored’s campus affiliate program, and co-editor and contributor to, most recently, Censorship, Digital Media and the Global Crackdown on Freedom of Expression, out this year from Peter Lang. He joins us now by phone from Naperville, Illinois. Welcome to CounterSpin, Steve Macek.

Steve Macek: Thanks for having me, Janine. I’m a big fan of the show.

Progressive (6/24)

JJ: Well, thank you. Let’s start with some definition. Dark money doesn’t mean funding for candidates or campaigns I don’t like, or from groups I don’t like. In your June piece for the Progressive, you spell out what it is, and where it can come from, and what we can know about it. Help us, if you would, understand just the rules around dark money.

SM: Sure. So dark money, and Anna Massoglia of OpenSecrets gave me, I think, a really nice, concise definition of dark money in the interview I did with her for this article. She called it “funding from undisclosed sources that goes to influence political outcomes, such as elections.” Now, thanks to the Supreme Court case in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, and some other cases, it is now completely legal for corporations and very wealthy individuals to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence the outcomes of elections.

Not all of that “independent expenditure” on elections is dark money. Dark money is spending that comes from organizations that do not have to disclose their donors. One sort of organization, I’m sure your listeners are really familiar with, are Super PACs, or, what they’re more technically known as, IRS Code 527 organizations. It can take unlimited contributions, and spend unlimited amounts on influencing elections, but they have to disclose the names of their donors.

There’s this other sort of organization, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, which is sometimes known as a “social welfare nonprofit,” who can raise huge amounts of money, but they do not have to disclose the names of their donors, but they are prevented from spending the majority of their budget on political activity, which means that a lot of these 501(c)(4) organizations spend 49.999% of their budget attempting to influence the outcomes of elections, and the rest of it is spent on things like general political education, or research that might, in turn, guide the creation of political ads and so on.

JJ: When we talk about influencing the outcome of elections, it’s not that they are taking out an ad for or against a particular candidate. That doesn’t have to be involved at all.

Guardian (5/17/24)

SM: Right. So they can sometimes run issue ads. Sometimes these dark money groups, as long as they’re working within the parameters of the law, will run ads for or against a particular candidate.

But take, for example, Citizens for Sanity, the group that I talked about at the beginning of my Progressive article: This is a group that nobody knows very much about. It showed up back in 2022, and ran $40 million worth of ads in four battleground states. Many of the ads were general ads attacking the Democrats for wanting to erase the border, or over woke culture-war themes, but they’re spending $40+ million on ads, according to one estimate.

What we do know is the officials of the group are almost identical to America First Legal, which was made up by former Trump administration officials. America First Legal was founded by Stephen Miller, that xenophobic former advisor and sometimes speechwriter to Donald Trump. No one really knows exactly who is funding this organization, because it is a 501(c)(4) social welfare nonprofit, and so is not required by the IRS to disclose its donors.

It has been running this year, in Ohio and elsewhere, a whole bunch of digital ads, and putting up billboards, for example, attacking Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown for his stance on immigration policies, basically saying he wants to protect criminal illegals, and also running these general, very snarky anti-“woke” ads saying, basically, Democrats used to care about the middle class, now they only care about race and gender and DEI.

JJ: Right. Well, I think “rich people influence policy,” it’s almost like “dog bites man” at this point, right? Yeah, it’s bad, but that’s how the system works, and I think it’s important to lift up: If it didn’t matter for donors to obscure their support for this or that, well then they wouldn’t be trying to obscure it.

And the thing you’re writing about, these are down-ballot issues, where you might believe that Citizens for Sanity, in this case, or any other organization, you might think of this as like a grassroots group that’s scrambled together some money to take out ads. And so it is meaningful to know to connect these financial dots.

SM: Absolutely. It is meaningful. And since you made reference to down-ballot races, one of the things that I think is so nefarious about dark money, and these dark money organizations, is that they are spending a lot on races for things like school boards or, as I discussed in the article, state attorney generals races.

There is this organization, it was founded in 2014, called the Republican Attorneys General Association, or RAGA, which is a beautiful acronym, and they have been trying to elect extremely reactionary Republicans to the top law enforcement position in state after state. And in 2022, they spent something like $8.9 million trying to defeat Democratic state attorney generals candidates in the 2022 elections.

ProPublica (10/11/23)

Now, they are a PAC of a kind, they’re a 527, so they have the same legal status as a Super PAC, so they have to disclose their donors. But the fact is, one of the major donors is a group called the Concord Fund, which has given them $17 million.

Concord Fund is a 501(c)(4) that was founded by Leonard Leo, the judicial activist affiliated with the Federalist Society, who is basically Donald Trump’s Supreme Court whisperer, who is largely responsible for the conservative takeover of the federal courts. His organization, this fund that he controls, gave $17 million to RAGA.

And we have no idea who contributed that money to the fund. We can make some educated guesses, but nobody really knows who’s funneling that money into trying to influence the election of the top law enforcement official in state after state around this country.

That’s alarming because, of course, some of these right-wing billionaires and corporations have a vested interest in who is sitting in that position. Because if it comes to enforcement of antitrust laws, or corruption laws, if they have a more friendly state attorney general in that position, it could mean millions of dollars for their bottom line.

JJ: And I think, from the point of view of the public, filtered through the point of view of the press, if you heard there’s this one macher, or this one rich person, and they’re pulling the strings and they’ve bought this judge, and they’ve paid for this policy and these ads, that would be one thing. But to have it filtered through a number of groups that are kind of opaque and you don’t really know, a minority point of view can be presented as a sort of groundswell of grassroots support.

SM: Exactly. It can create this sort of astroturfing effect where, “Oh, there are all these ads being run. It must be that there are lots of people who are really concerned or really opposed to this particular candidate,” when, in fact, it could be a single billionaire who is routing money for a number of different shells and front groups in an effort to influence the outcome of an election.

Colorado Newsline (10/21/23)

So I think attorney generals races are one kind of down-ballot race where we’ve seen a lot of dark money spent. School board elections are another, and this is something that has been really evident in the past couple of years, where various different Super PACs and other dark money groups have spent millions of dollars, that are affiliated with advocates for charter schools, and advocates for school vouchers have been spending money trying to elect school board members that are pro-voucher and pro–charter school.

In 2023, City Fund, which is a national pro–charter school group, bankrolled in part by billionaire Reed Hastings, donated $1.75 million from its affiliated PAC to a 501(c)(4), Denver Families for Public Schools, to try to elect three “friendly” pro–charter school candidates for the city school board, and all three of the candidates won.

And I don’t know about you, but I don’t have children who went through the public system here in Naperville, I didn’t pay very close attention to who was running in those races, or who was backing those people. I just would read about it a couple days before the election. Most people don’t pay very close attention, unless they’re employees of the school district, or have children currently in school. They’re not paying that close attention to the school board elections. And so this influx of dark money could very well have tipped those races in the favor of the pro–charter school.

JJ: And name that group again, because it didn’t say “charter schools.”

SM: So the charter school group was City Fund, and it donated money to Denver Families for Public Schools….

JJ: : For “public schools….”

SM: Right, which is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. Yes, and it’s got this Orwellian name, because it’s Denver Families for Public Schools. But what they wanted to do was, of course, create more charter schools.

JJ: It’s deep, and it’s confusing because it’s designed to be confusing, and it’s opaque because, you know….

And then, OK, so here come media. And we know that lots of people, including reporters, still imagine the US press corps as kind of like an old movie, with press cards in their hat band, or Woodward and Bernstein connecting dots, holding the powerful to account, and the chips are just falling where they may.

And you make the point in the Progressive piece that there have been excellent corporate news media exposés of the influence of dark money, connecting those dots. But you write that news media have “missed or minimized as many stories about dark money as they have covered.” What are you getting at there?

ProPublica (12/14/22)

SM: I absolutely believe that. So it is true, as I say, that there have been some excellent reports about dark money. Here in Chicago, we had this reclusive billionaire industrialist, Barre Seide, who made what most people say is the largest political contribution in American history. He donated his company to a fund, Marble Freedom Fund, run by Leonard Leo, again, a conservative judicial activist.

The Marble Freedom Fund sold the company for $1.6 billion. It’s hard for the corporate media to ignore a political contribution of $1.6 billion. That’s a $1.6 billion trust fund that Leonard Leo, who engineered the conservative takeover of the US Supreme Court, is going to be able to use—he’s a very right-wing, conservative Catholic—to put his particular ideological stamp on American elections and on American culture. And so that got reported.

And, in fact, there have been some really excellent follow-up reports by ProPublica, among others, about how various Leonard Leo–affiliated organizations have influenced judicial appointments and have influenced judicial elections. So you have to give credit where credit’s due.

But the problem is that there are so many other cases where dark money is in play. Whether or not you can say it’s determining the outcome of elections or not is another story. But where dark money is playing a role, and it is simply not being talked about.

Steve Macek: “Outside forces who, in some cases, do not have to disclose the source of their funding can spend more on a race than the candidates themselves.”

Think about the last month of this current presidential election. There hasn’t been much discussion about the influence of dark money. And yet OpenSecrets just came out with an analysis where they say that contributions from dark money groups and shell organizations are outpacing all prior elections in this year, and might surpass the $660 million in contributions from dark money sources that flooded the 2020 elections. So they’re projecting that could be as much as a billion dollars. We haven’t heard very much about this.

I don’t think necessarily dark money is going to make a huge difference one way or the other in the presidential race, but it certainly can make a difference in congressional races and attorney generals races, school board races, city council races, that’s where it can make a huge difference.

And I do know that OpenSecrets, among others, have done research, and they found that there were cases where, over a hundred different congressional races, there was more outside spending on those races than were spent by either of the candidates. Which is a scandal, that outside forces who, in some cases, do not have to disclose the source of their funding can spend more on a race than the candidates themselves.

JJ: And it’s disheartening, the idea that, while you’re swimming in it, it’s too big of an issue to even lift out.

SM: And I think that’s also part of the reason why it’s accepted, sort of like the weather. And I think that’s part of the reason why there isn’t as much reporting in the corporate media as there ought to be about legal struggles over the regulation of dark money.

JJ: That’s exactly where I was going to lead you, for a final question, just because we know that reporters will say, well, they can’t cover what isn’t happening. But it is happening, that legal and community and policy pushback on this influence is happening. And so, finally, what should we know about that?

Roll Call (5/14/24)

SM: State-level Republican lawmakers, and state legislatures across the country, are pushing legislation that would prohibit state officials and agencies from collecting or disclosing information about donors to nonprofits, including donors to those 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations that I spoke about, that spend money on politics. So they’re trying to pass laws to make dark money even darker, to make this obscure money influencing our elections even harder to track. And I will say there are Republicans in Congress who have introduced federal legislation that would do the same thing.

Now, the bills that are being pushed through state legislatures, not probably going to be a surprise to anybody who follows this, are based on a model bill that was developed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which is a policy development organization that is funded by the Koch network of right-wing foundations, millionaires and billionaires. And they meet every year to develop model right-wing, libertarian legislation, that then is dutifully introduced into state legislatures around the country.

And since 2018, a number of states, including Alabama, Arizona, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia, have all adopted some version of this ALEC legislation that criminalizes disclosing donors to nonprofits that engage in political activity.

And in Arizona, where this conservative legislation was made into law, in 2022, there was a ballot referendum by the voters on the Voter’s Right to Know Act, Proposition 211, that would basically reverse the ALEC attempt to criminalize the disclosure of the names of donors. It would require PACs spending at least $50,000 on statewide campaigns to disclose all donors who have given more than $5,000—a direct reversal of the ALEC-inspired law.

New Yorker (11/16/22)

Conservative dark money group spent a lot of money trying to defeat this, and yet they lost. And then they spent a lot of money challenging the new law, Proposition 211, in court. And it has gone to trial, I think, three times, and been defeated each time.

Now, the initial battle over Proposition 211 was covered to some degree in the corporate media, the New York Times, Jane Mayer at the New Yorker, who does excellent reporting on dark money issues, discussed it. But since then, we have gotten very little coverage of the court battles that continue to this day over this attempt to bring more transparency to campaign spending in the state of Arizona.

JJ: So, not to hammer it too hard home, but there are legal efforts, policy efforts around the country, to bring more transparency, to explode this idea of dark money, to connect the dots, and more media coverage of them would actually have an amplifying effect on that very transparency.

SM: Absolutely right. You would think that media organizations, whether they’re corporate or independent media, would have a vested interest in seeing more transparency in election spending. That would benefit their own reporting, and the reporters. And yet they really haven’t done a great job of covering it.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Steve Macek. He’s professor and chair of communication and media studies at North Central College in Illinois, and a co-coordinator of Project Censored’s campus affiliate program. The piece we’re talking about, “Dark Money Uncovered,” can be found at TheProgressive.org. Steve Macek, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.